In the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) process, excessive foaming beyond the converter capacity is called “slopping”. Slopping reduces iron yield and equipment lifespan. Therefore, it is important to control slag foaming properly. In previous studies, the jet from top lance in BOF process effectively suppressed slag foaming. However, the mechanism that the jet from top lance suppresses slag foaming...
Achieving the highest productivity and cost-optimized production is essential for the long-term competitiveness and profitability of integrated BOF steelmaking. To meet these demands, steel plants, particularly in the Americas and Europe, are increasingly focusing on revamps, upgrades, and modernization to ensure maximum productivity, stable output quality, availability, minimized maintenance...
For our industry’s efforts to reduce its contribution to CO2 emissions, including larger amounts of pre-reduced metallics in the raw materials mix represents major potential. Within existing integrated plants, this can be applied at the blast furnace, but the BOF shop plays an equally important role. An overview of existing technologies and methods is set out in this paper. The study also...
Even in our future, green industry, many steel producers will continue to rely on the BOF process for the liquid side of their production route. The steel plant of the future is a hybrid plant and with its small carbon footprint, large scale and capability for producing the most challenging steel qualities, the BOF converter shop will remain a major capacity hub in many future plant...
Nitrogen is a critical element with regards to steel quality. Depending on the application, the maximum allowable N-concentration varies between 20 to 120 ppm. Over the years, the BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) route of steelmaking is known to be superior in N control, largely due to the stripping effect of CO gas bubbles generated during decarburisation reactions. However, in the future low-CO2...
To know the temperature and deformation of the vessel shell of steelmaking converters, is already years a wish for the maintenance team of steelmaking plants in order to predict remaining lifetime of top cone, detect damages in refractory, compare operation conditions, etc. However, the most interesting areas for this information are barrel section and top cone. But these areas are not visible...
Through summarizing and analysis of problemes and contradiction in the steelmaking process, reasonable highly efficiency and long life combined blowing mechanism and choice was proposed. Laboratory experiments and research of slagging and element oxidation mechanism were carried out with the aim of adapting the highly efficiency refining control technique, in which the salgging characteristics...
For the purpose of obtaining further information on decarbulization blowing with oxygen jet in BOF, a course of study on cavity formation with water model was carried out using CO2 gas as a dissolving gas. Ar gas, CO2 gas, or a mixture of them was blown from a lance onto aqueous bath of various composition. The cavity formed under CO2 blowing was larger compared to that under Ar blowing of the...
In steelmaking, the phosphorus content of the hot metal is an important input parameter which can have a direct impact on the quality of the produced steel. Due to the diminishing quality of iron ore deposits, it can be assumed that the input of phosphorus into the blast furnace will increase in the future. For this reason, there is a need to develop effective phosphorus slagging strategies...
Argon-oxygen decarburization (AOD) is the most common refining process in stainless steelmaking. The converter’s tuyere region has complex multiphase phenomena and extremely harsh environment, which makes direct experimental process measurements very difficult. However, valuable information can be obtained using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This minireview targets to critically examine...
