Physical characteristics of a horizontally injected gas jet and turbulent flow in metallurgical vessels

Abstract

Besides the bottom vertical gas blowing, horizontal gas injection through both a nozzle fitted at the sidewall and a submerged lance has a wide application to metallurgical processes for converting and refining purposes. Based on analysis of the behavior of a gas jet injected horizontally into liquid, a plume model was presented to predict the volume fraction of gas in the two-phase region, and a mathematical model was developed to predict three-dimensional turbulent flow and mixing process. In the present work, three types of horizontal injection were taken into account and the optimization of gas injection through a submerged lance with one horizontal tuyere was carried out. The results show that the maximum volume fraction of gas along the upward jet trajectory decreases by about 50% compared with the bottom vertical blowing, while the half-value radius of maximum volume fraction of gas increases about two times; the distributions of velocity and turbulent kinetic energy are relatively uniform and big azimuthal component of velocity is produced in the bath; horizontal injection has an advantage of rapid mixing over bottom injection and the injection by a submerged lance with one horizontal tuyere shows the shortest mixing; basically, the presented models are capable of describing the phenomena occurring in the bath with horizontal gas injection.