Simulation of inclusion removal in bottom-blowing ladle with tracking the collision of inclusions and bubbles in transient time steps

Abstract

Ladle bottom-blowing is one of the most important ways to remove the inclusions in the molten steel during steel making process. Many works have been reported to optimize the bottom blowing parameters by numerical simulations. However, it is a challenge to capture the collision between the inclusions and the bubbles during a discrete time step, which may lead to the underestimation of the inclusion removal rate. In this work, a program based on the user-define-function (UDF) in ANSYS FLUENT was developed to solve the problem above. The bottom blowing parameters of the ladle were optimized based on the developed novel model.