from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
The basic procedure of secondary metallurgy is blowing liquid steel with inert gases. This treatment is applied in the ladle at the ladle furnace station. The main task of the injected gas is to homogenize the liquid steel both in terms of temperature and chemistry, and to capture and transfer non-metallic inclusions (NMIs) to the slag phase. The effectiveness of the liquid steel blowing process in the ladle depends on many factors. The main of them is the energy of the injected gas stream, under the influence of which the hydrodynamic conditions for mixing liquid steel in the ladle are formed. As well as the size and number of gas bubbles that flow out, which determine the efficiency of refining liquid steel with NMIs.The article presents the results of tests carried out on a laboratory stand equipped with a physical water model of a ladle. The research was aimed at determining the importance of the size of the active surface of the purging plug used when blowing argon into the ladle to the above-mentioned factors. The criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the liquid steel blowing process were the minimum time of complete mixing of the model liquid in the ladle model and the degree of gas dispersion in the volume of the model liquid. The minimum mixing time was determined on the basis of the determined mixing curves, and the degree of gas dispersion in the liquid was determined on the basis of visualization tests.
Keywords: Secondary metallurgy, steel, ladle, argon, physical modelling© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.