Preface to the Special Issue on “Recent Progress of Science & Technologies in Thermophysical Properties of Molten Slag and Metals at High Temperatures”

Study

Thermophysical properties of molten iron alloys, slags and fluxes at high temperatures are extremely important information for process metallurgists to improve the conventional iron- and steel-making processes as well as to design new technologies. Although the importance of thermophysical properties has been recognized well, there are only limited numbers of data in the literature and the accuracy is quite questionable due to the difficulties in high temperature experiments. Thanks to the recent developments in measurements and model prediction techniques coupling with thermodynamic data and structural analysis, the reliability of these data has been extremely increased very recently.

This special issue is a subset of the papers that were presented at the 10th Asian Thermophysical Properties Conference (ATPC), held in Jeju, Korea, from September 29 to October 3, 2013. The Korean Society of Thermophysical Properties organized the conference, and the high temperature thermophysical properties forum of ISIJ agreed to publish the special issue for “Recent Progress of Science & Technologies in Thermophysical Properties of Molten Slag and Metals at High Temperatures.”

With the attendance of 396 participants from 18 countries worldwide, 190 oral and 244 poster presentations were made. On this topic, Prof. Gernot Pottlacher, Technical University of Graz, Austria was invited as a plenary lecturer, Prof. Hiroyuki Fukuyama, Tohoku University, Japan was invited as a keynote lecturer, and Prof. Toshihiro Tanaka, Osaka University, Japan, Prof. Muxing Guo, KU Leuven, Belgium, and Prof. Il Sohn, Yonsei University, Korea gave invited lectures. Oral and poster presentations were focusing on the special topics: (1) thermophysical properties of liquid metals, (2) structure, viscosity, electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity and radiative heat transfer of slags, (3) improvements of measurement techniques, (4) modeling of thermophysical properties, and (5) application of thermophysical property measurements in high temperature processing.

The Guest Editors carefully invited selected-authors to submit their papers to this special issue. All papers submitted for this special issue were subjected to the Journal’s general rigorous review procedure, and the collected accepted papers provide an excellent overview of the recent progress of science and technologies in the study of thermophysical properties of molten slag and metals at high temperatures (Table 1).

Table 1. Selected papers for the special issue.

Overview	The Importance of Materials Properties in High-Temperature Processes	K C. Mills, M. Guo
Slags	Thermal Conductivity of Molten Slags: A Review of Measurement Techniques and Discussion based on ...	Y. Kang et al.
	Density of the Blast Furnace Slag Bearing TiO2 at 1673 K	Y. Liu et al.
	Viscosities of Iron Blast Furnace Slags	M. Chen et al.
	Structure-Viscosity Relationship of Low-silica Calcium Aluminosilicate Melts	T. Kim, J. Park
	Effect of Potassium Oxide Addition on Viscosity of Calcium Aluminosilicate Melts at 1673–1873 K	T. Higo et al.
	Viscosity Measurement of SiO2–Na2O Melts with Addition of NaF	O. Takeda et al.
	Effect of SiO2/Al2O3 and TiO2/SiO2 ratios on the Viscosity and Structure of the TiO2–MnO–SiO2–Al2O3 Welding ...	J. Kim, I. Sohn
	Initial Wetting and Spreading Phenomena of a CaO–SiO2 Liquid Slag on MgO Substrates	J. Park et al.
	Rheological Behavior and Empirical Model of Simulated Foaming Slag	K. Yamashita et al.
	Effects of Agitation and Morphology of Primary Crystalline Phase on Crystallization Behaviors of CaO–SiO2–CaF2 ...	Y. Harada et al.
	Relationship between Molten Oxide Structure and Thermal Conductivity in the CaO–SiO2–B2O3 System	Y. Kim, K. Morita
	Thermal Diffusivity Measurement of Oxide Scale Formed on Steel during Hot-rolling Process	R. Endo et al.
	Influence of High Temperature Interaction between Sinter and Lump Ores on the Formation Behavior of ...	X. Liu et al.
Metals	Influence of Oxygen Partial Pressure on Surface Tension of Molten Type 304 and 316 Stainless Steels Measured by ...	S. Ozawa et al.
	Surface Tension Measurements of 430 Stainless Steel	J. Choe et al.
	Dynamic Surface Tension Behavior of Liquid Iron during Carburization and Decarburization	H. Fukuyama et al.
	Surface Tension of Liquid Ag–Cu Binary Alloys	J. Brillo et al.
	Concentration Dependence of Molar Volume of Binary Si Alloys in Liquid State	A. Mizuno et al.
	Development of High Hydrogen Concentration References for Measuring Hydrogen Ingress into Steels	K. Kim et al.

The Guest Editors would like to thank all the authors for their contributions, the numerous reviewers for reviewing the papers, General Chair (Prof. Hyung Sun Kim, Inha University) and Organizing Committee Members of ATPC 2013, and the present and previous Editors-in Chief of ISIJ International (Prof. Eiki Kasai, Tohoku University and Prof. Hisao Esaka, National Defense Academy of Japan) for editing this special issue.