Three dimensional simulation of lime particle penetration into molten iron bath using smoothed particle hydrodynamics

It is desirable to enhance the desulfurization and dephosphorization rates and their efficiencies in steelmaking. Injection of flux particles is one of the key technologies, and knowledge of the behavior of the particles when they penetrate into a metal bath is important to control the process. In this study, two-dimensional and three-dimensional simulation models were developed to study the penetration behavior when a solid body penetrates into a liquid, using the SPH method with a new pairwise potential. The three-dimensional simulation model could reproduce the experimental results in the water model satisfactorily, and was applied to a lime sphere-molten iron bath system. The penetration length and the residence time increased with the increase in initial velocity. The residence time of the sphere also increased as the wettability increased. The critical velocity for penetration, estimated by simulation, showed good agreement with that calculated using Ozawa's equation.