Projects : Gas Stirred Ladle

The aim of the study is to model interaction between steel and slag, to calculate steel/slag mass transfer coefficient, and to predict critical gas flow rate, where mass transfer mechanism is changed.

Initial simulations were performed on the base of the water/oil model of the ladle. For the simulations incompressible multi-phase solver with Volume-of-Fluid interface tracking algorithm is used. Dynamic mesh refinement is used on water/oil and water/air interfaces for correct shear stress prediction. To reduce simulation time we attempted to use load balancing, yet finally we opted for weighted mesh decomposition, which is more stable.

For the industrial scale ladle we need to consider compressibility of the gas, since ferrostatic pressure in this case is quite large. The simulations have very good agreement on the open-eye shape and size. Critical flow rate is calculated from linear fit of the mass transfer coefficient as a function of the flow rate.

Major results of the study were reported at 15th international conference on industrial applications of computational fluid dynamics (https://www.sintef.no/projectweb/cfd2024/) and published in proceedings of the conference.