Wall stresses in dual bottom purged steel making ladles

Dual gas purging is often done in a ladle to accelerate the refining operations in steel industries. The purged gas, mainly argon imparts momentum to the molten metal and establishes a turbulent recirculating flow in the melt, which generates shear stresses on the ladle walls. These stresses in-turn leads to the erosion of the refractory lining, which is undesirable. A three dimensional, transient, multi-phase turbulent model has been developed to predict the shear stress distribution along the wall in dual plug, bottom purged ladles. A parametric study has been performed to understand the dependence of wall stresses on various operating parameters like argon flow rate, metal bath depth, slag thickness as well as on the configuration of the gas injectors. A dimensionless correlation is proposed using regression analysis that predicts the maximum wall stress in the form of skin friction coefficient in terms of the above parameters.