Collision-coalescence among inclusions with bubble attachment and transport in molten steel of RH

Abstract Inclusions can lead to various defects in the final steel products, and RH vacuum refining is an effective and vital technology to remove inclusions from molten steel. By the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, the inclusion mass/population conservation model is developed to have a deep insight into the inclusion transfer behavior in the argon molten steel flow of RH. Particularly, the argon slip velocity is introduced into the inclusion convection velocity in the mathematical model, and the inclusions attached by argon bubbles can return to the molten steel when bubbles escape from the free surface of the vacuum chamber. The numerical results of the fluid flow and the inclusion transfer behavior are validated by the measured data in the actual experiment. The argon bubbles significantly enhance the inclusion transport and collision-coalescence process. Besides, the variations of the inclusion volume concentration and the inclusion number density in the up snorkel are about 2 times those in the down snorkel. The number of inclusions with diameters less than 10 μm decreases with the vacuum treatment time, while the number of inclusions with diameters greater than 10 μm increases first and then decreases gradually. Near the free surface of the ladle, there are the greatest inclusion volume concentration, the greatest inclusion number density and the lowest inclusion characteristic radius.