Inclination Effect on Mixing Time in a Gas–Stirred Side–Blown Converter

Small‐scale physical models are commonly used to investigate gas‐stirred processes in steelmaking practice. The argon oxygen decarburization (AOD) converter is among various processes widely used in the metallurgy field and utilizes side blowing of oxygen and inert gas for mixing in the bath. Herein, the effect of the converter inclination on mixing time and jet‐penetration length with a side‐blown physical model is investigated. Scaling with the modified Froude number is applied on data from a real industrial AOD converter to achieve a system with reasonable gas flow rates. During the experiments, water is used to simulate liquid steel and air is blown through side‐mounted nozzles for stirring. A NaCl tracer is added and subsequent conductivity measurements are used to measure mixing time. Overall, the penetration length is shown to be independent of inclination angle. The mixing time is found to be influenced by the change of bath height to diameter ratio, change of geometry in the bath volume, gas flow rate, and the intensified wave motion at the interface caused by the inclination of the vessel. The mixing time increase with 14% when 14° angle is applied. Gas penetration length and mixing time are investigated when applying an inclination to a down‐scaled physical air–water model of an industrial argon oxygen decarburization (AOD) converter. The overall results show no significant change to the penetration length when tilting the vessel. However, the mixing time increases from 14 to 39% depending on inclination angle and gas flow rate.