ANALYSIS OF VELOCITY AND TEMPERATURE FIELDS OF MOLTEN METAL IN DC ELECTRIC ARC FURNACE

Recently some small scale industries have started using DC electric arc furnace to recycle scrap materials, however modelling and simulation data are very limited in the literature. Therefore, it appears that a numerical simulation could provide many important components for predicting suitable operating conditions, better design and efficient control of the process. With this objective, a numerical simulation model is developed under certain simplifying assumptions. A SIMPLER algorithm is used to solve the model equations.Computed results show that the circulating patterns and the patterns of increasing the temperature of the melt are significantly affected by the change in bottom electrode diameter and these calculated results present very important information. For example, a furnace can be designed in such a way that the melt temperature can be increased uniformly throughout the bath which is very important for making homogeneous alloys. It is also found that the effect of natural convection on melt circulation is negligible, that is, circulation is totally controlled by the electromagnetic force field. In addition to the flow field data, data obtained from the electromagnetic field computations are also presented.