A study of some aspects of gas-slag-metal interactions : Towards dynamic process model and control

A new approach was made to model the dephosphorisation process in a 300 tons basic oxygen furnace converter with three argon gas inlets. The main feature of the new approach was to utilise the velocity vectors obtained by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation in a standalone model. The CFD simulation was carried out using commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics. In the standalone model, the steel melt domain was sliced into 1000 cells. The calculated velocity vector in each cell was assumed constant. Based on the imported velocity vectors from the CFD calculation, the mass transfer of carbon and phosphorus was calculated by taking into account the slag-metal reactions. The mass exchange between slag and metal was considered to be dominated by the metal droplet formation due to the oxygen jet. The convergence of the model calculation and the promising comparison between the model prediction and the industrial data strongly suggested that the proposed approach would be a powerful tool in dynamic process control. As a preliminary step, the model only simulated the process after the formation of slag-metal-gas emulsion. Note that the present work is intended to establish a structure of the model. More precise descriptions of other process aspects need to be included before the model can be practically employed in a dynamic controlling system.