Effect of both radial position and number of porous plugs on chemical and thermal mixing in an industrial ladle involving two phase flow

Abstract

Gas injection in metallurgical vessels is an important tool to improve chemical and thermal mixing. Chemical mixing has been extensively studied in the past 40 years, however, thermal mixing is still poorly understood. This work reports a mathematical model developed to describe the effect of the number and position of porous plugs on thermal and chemical mixing under industrial conditions. A relevant contribution of this work is the evidence indicating a suppressing effect of bottom gas injection on thermal homogenization with off-center gas injection; furthermore, it also suggests that mixing time is optimized with only one nozzle instead of two or three. © 2011 ISIJ.