Abstract
The standard production route for mild steels for automotive purposes is still based on conventional continuous casting (CC) and hot strip rolling (HSR). The current trend towards the “zero-carbon car” will demand the abating of material emissions in the future. Thin slab casting and direct rolling (e.g., Arvedi endless strip production (ESP)) is an approach to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% compared to CC and HSR. One of the main limitations in applying ESP for the production of ultra-low carbon/interstitial free (ULC/IF) steels is clogging. Clogging is the blockage of the submerged entry nozzle due to the build-up of oxide layers or an oxide network. The high clogging sensitivity of IF steels results most probably from the FeTi addition, and hence, a general change of the deoxidation practice might be an option to overcome these problems. In the present work, the thorough refining process of ULC steel was simulated by addressing the different deoxidation routes and the influence of titanium (Ti) alloying on steel cleanness. The developed ladle furnace (LF) and the Ruhrstahl Heraeus (RH) refining models were applied to perform the simulation. Before the simulations, the models are briefly described and validated by the published industrial data.
Highlights
Ultra-low carbon (ULC) steel is widely applied because of the high ductility and high surface quality for the production of cars, white goods, and drawn-and-ironed (D&I) cans
It is necessary to control aspects in the steel refining process, such as minimizing the size and the number of nonmetallic inclusions generated during the deoxidation refining process, reducing alloy loss, and depressing clogging problems
It was summarized that commercial thermodynamic databases were widely applied to consider the multiphase reactions; the reaction kinetics were calculated based on double film theory and the effective equilibrium reaction zone (EERZ) method; all the simulations were evaluated by comparing with the industrial data, and the strong agreement indicated the validation of the models
Summary
Ultra-low carbon (ULC) steel is widely applied because of the high ductility and high surface quality for the production of cars, white goods, and drawn-and-ironed (D&I) cans. Numerous models on LF and RH processes have been proposed to study the steel refining reactions. The other simulations on RH decarburization and the degassing mechanism offered valuable references for developing the modeling work [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] These studies suggested that the decarburization’s main reaction sites in the RH process are the Ar bubble surface, the bath surface, and inside the bath of the vacuum chamber. The through-process simulation of the secondary refining of steel is rarely reported, though various individual models on the LF and RH process were developed and applied to address the specific topics. The refining process of ULC steel was simulated using the developed model. The simulations addressed the influence of carbon pre-deoxidation and FeTi addition on the Al deoxidized steel refining
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