State of the Art in Control of Inclusions, Their Characterization, and Future Requirements
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ARCELORMITTAL, similar to other worldwide steel producers, is making every effort to make cleaner steels to meet customer demands while improving steelmaking and casting processes. One key area is to characterize and control the inclusions in the steel that affect its mechanical properties. After the merger between former Arcelor S.A. and Mittal Steel, researchers with expertise in the area of inclusion engineering teamed up to exchange the experiences on clean steelmaking, which are available separately in predecessor companies, and recommended to standardize the characterization techniques across the entire group. As a follow-up of these recommendations, a series of research was carried out to develop a suite of techniques to perform future clean steelmaking studies more efficiently. As reports that describe the characterization techniques in detail[1–4] were already available, efforts in the current exercise were directed to understand the applicability of these techniques by performing characterization on the steel grades in common production. The article begins with a discussion about the inclusions that create problems in the steel grades of interest coupled with suggestions for appropriate sampling and techniques to carry out inclusion characterization. This is followed by a summary of the proposed tools for an inclusion analysis for use in research and plant studies to diagnose the root cause of the industrial P. KAUSHIK, Senior Researcher, is with the Steelmaking and Refractories, ArcelorMittal Global Research and Development, East Chicago, IN 46312. Contact e-mail: pallava.kaushik@arcelormittal. com J. LEHMANN, Expert, is with the Process Engineering Division, ArcelorMittal Global Research and Development, Voie Romaine, BP 30320, 57283 Maizieres-les-Metz, France. M. NADIF, Researcher, is with the Steelmaking Process Division, ArcelorMittal Global Research and Development. Manuscript Submitted August 5, 2011. Article published online March 23, 2012. 710—VOLUME 43B, AUGUST 2012
problem. Thereafter, a round robin analysis conducted on selected steel samples is presented. The article finishes with a few examples of use of these techniques to analyze the steelmaking problems. Figure 1 explains the methodology to conduct inclusion characterization as a part of the projects studying the issues that affect either the quality of the steel or its end use properties. To initiate steel characterization, the obvious questions to answer are as follows: What is the purpose of characterizing inclusions, and which methods can provide faster and reliable results? This process includes steel sampling followed by the sample analysis, and combining the inclusion analysis results with modeling and previous experience to propose a solution. Sometimes, the entire process has to be repeated after conducting plant trials to confirm the success of the proposed solution. The inclusion characterization process, in contrast, can be divided into a series of smaller steps that identify the dependency of a problem with steel grades and incl
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