On the Study of a Liquid Steel Sampling Process

The liquid steel sampling method is one of the commonly used procedures in monitoring the steelmaking process. Besides it can be used for analyzing the dissolved alloys, hydrogen content and oxygen content, it can be also employed to monitor the inclusion characteristics at the steelmakings. Here, a crucial point is that the steel sampler should be filled and the metal solidifies without changing the inclusion characteristics. Therefore, the objective of this work is to fundamentally understand the liquid steel sampling process by means of analyzing and modeling the two-phase flow during the sampler filling process, and verifying the mathematical model by using the experimental data. The present dissertation presents an experimental and theoretical study of the filling process of both the lollipop-shaped sampler and the rectangular-shaped sampler. Firstly, a physical modeling by using a water model has been carried out to fundamentally investigate the flow pattern inside the sampler vessels during its filling. The flow patterns were obtained by a PIV system. Then, a mathematical model has been built to theoretically understand the phenomena. The commercial CFD code was used. Here, different turbulence model have been compared between the realizable k-ε turbulence model and Wilcox k-ω turbulence model. It concludes that the Wilcox k-ω turbulence model agrees well with the PIV measurements.HH Thus, the preferred it was further employed to predict the turbulent flow inside the production lollipop-shaped sampler fillings. It is important to find that the average collision volume in the production steel sampler without solidification at filling is about 30 times higher than that in a ladle furnace. In the end, the whole sampling system was modeled. The initial solidification during the filling was taken into account. Focus was on the influence of the initial solidification on the inclusion concentrations. A discrete phase model was used to simulate the movement of inclusions in the liquid steel. Some selected different sized primary inclusions that exist in the ladles at a steelmaking process were simulated. The same method of studying the filling procedure of the lollipop-shaped sampler was further applied to comprehensively investigate the rectangular-shaped sampler.QC 2010090