Progress on half a century of process modelling research in steelmaking: a review

Process modelling in steelmaking started from mid-sixties and witnessed rapid growth and wide spread applications during the last fifty years or so. In the early years, key roles in steelmaking process modelling were played, mainly by researchers from Imperial College, spearheaded subsequently by three North American Professors, Brimacombe, Guthrie and Szekely, as well as their associates. By the nineties, process modelling in steelmaking became popular and a reasonably matured research approach. Significant R&D efforts continued in the academia and industry in the intervening period and these resulted in many applications of mathematical modelling in steelmaking process analysis, design, optimization and control.

Notable efforts by various groups of researchers in the arena are briefly reviewed in this work to trace the growth path of process modelling research in steelmaking. It is shown that early applications, while were primarily restricted to grossly idealized situations, presently, however, significantly more advanced and complex process models are increasingly applied to investigate steelmaking. These have accordingly led to improved understanding, providing useful insights of the underlying process dynamics. Case studies from the arena of converter steelmaking, AOD (argon oxygen decarburization), ladle metallurgy, vacuum degassing, tundish metallurgy, continuous and ingot casting are included and discussed briefly to present the state of the art. The review confirms substantial progress and suggests that future endeavors need considerably more emphasis towards integrating coupled chemical reactions, mass transfer and multiple species transport, nucleation, and growth phenomena etc., in the ambit of the currently available process models, such that fully predictive models are developed to carry out comprehensive industrial scale simulations. In such context, integration of actual steelmaking process features and concurrent industrial scale validation of mathematical models are also highlighted. A few, practically relevant but unaddressed problems, needing attention are also mentioned in the text.