Preliminary Numerical Simulation of Chemically Reacting Gas and Liquid Phases in Oxygen Steelmaking

A preliminary dynamic model is developed to predict the foaming phenomenon in oxygen steelmaking incorporating Computational Fluid Dynamics, which will be able to simulate the evolution of the physical properties throughout a blow and predict the foaming height with time. The computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model developed by Sattar et al (Sattar et al., 2013a, Sattar et al., 2013c, Sattar et al., 2013b) was extended to incorporate the chemical reactions on removal of impurity elements. The model includes three phases: gas, liquid and foam. The major removal reactions of carbon (C), silicon (Si), manganese (Mn) and phosphorus (P) were included with the mass transfer within and between gas and liquid phases. The model incorporated the first order diffusion kinetics with static equilibrium values for carbon and silicon, while for manganese and phosphorus, the first order diffusion kinetics with dynamic equilibrium values were used. The real plant data reported in IMPHOS (Millman et al., 2011) report was used for the simulation validation, after simulating it for 20 minutes of real time. The results obtained were in reasonable agreement with the real plant data as reported in the IMPHOS (Millman et al., 2011) report. The observed deviations were mainly due to the merging of slag phase with the liquid phase and limited number of reactions used, compared to the actual process.