Industrial ladle furnace slag composition analysis with optical emissions from the arc

Abstract

With the strict standards for steel quality and high production rates, the demand for faster and more convenient slag composition analysis for both electric arc and ladle furnaces has become a major issue in industrial steel plants. To overcome the time-delay between slag sampling and results of the slag composition analysis, an on-line slag composition analysis is required. Such a method that can be used in on-line analysis and is also chemically sensitive to the slag composition is optical emission spectroscopy. In this work, the optical emissions from the arc have been measured in an industrial ladle furnace and used for slag composition analysis. This article focuses on CaF2 and MgO, since the CaF2 is a common additive material in the ladle treatment and high MgO content means that the ladle refractory lining is dissolving into the slag. The analysis has been carried out by comparing emission line ratios to the XRF analyzed ratios of CaF2/MgO and MnO/MgO, respectively. The results show that several atomic emissions lines of calcium, magnesium, and manganese can be used to evaluate the CaF2/MgO and MnO/MgO ratios in the slag. It was found out that the plasma temperature derived from Ca I emission lines has a non-linear relation with the CaF2 content of the slag. Additionally, the dissociation pathways of molecular slag components were determined and studied in different plasma temperatures with equilibrium composition computation in order to determine the relations between the slag and plasma compositions.