Manganese is one of the important elements for characterization of steel and its concentration is controlled in a steelmaking process. Recently, manganese ore can be used in a basic oxygen furnace blowing because the amount of slag is drastically reduced. Accordingly, if changes of the manganese concentration can be monitored more rapidly and accurately during the basic oxygen furnace operation, manganese ore can be utilized to control the final component of molten steel instead of expensive manganese alloy.
In this work, we focus on the vapor generated naturally from the molten steel and investigated an on-line system for monitoring the manganese concentration applying the principle of an atomic absorption spectrometry. In using a lab-melting furnace, we confirmed good correlation between the absorption ratio (Mn/Fe) and the manganese concentration within 0.2% in the molten steel.
