Fundamental investigation on crack propagation behavior of refractories by finite element method

Abstract

Damages of the refractory are main factor of destabilizing the steel production. For this reason, development of numerical methods for evaluating the strength and lifetime is important problem in order to stabilize steel production. Generally, refractories exhibit heavily non-linear behavior such as cracking. Therefore, there is concern over the failure of non-linear analysis or worsening of a convergence using general purpose finite element pre-package program. In this study, the smeared cracking model, linear elastic- brittle failure model, and the maximum principal stress criterion were added to original in-house finite element program. Also, the validity and the robustness were confirmed through a simple numerical example.