Introduction

With the globalization, steel market has become competitive both with respect to quality and cost of steel. Steel industry is required to produce quality steel at a reasonable cost so that it remains competitive with the world market. For this purpose constant and continuous efforts are required to introduce either new steelmaking technology or to improve the process technologies in the existing steel processing vessels like converter, ladle, continuous casting tundish and mold. In order to meet these objectives, a sustainable research and development activities must be carried out in the plant to address the quality issues in the steel product and then to introduce changes in the steel processing line, that is product- process integration approach. One of the research tools is to design the model of the actual process (here after we call proto type) so that specific studies can be made. The results of these studies can then be implemented for the desired objectives.  A model of the process can either be physical or mathematical. The present lecture deals with some issue related to design of physical models of steelmaking processes.

Physical model

In physical modeling, the model reactor and experiments are designed based on the similarity criteria between the prototype and model. Both, model and prototype, must be similar geometrically, dynamically, chemically and thermally.

Two systems are said to be geometrically similar when for every point in the model, there exists a corresponding point in the prototype. This can be achieved by maintaining a constant ratio between the linear dimensions of the systems. This is called scale factor .

(1)

The above relation suggests that two systems following the geometrical similarly should have the same aspect ratio of the vessel . The value of scale factor indicates how big or small model would be. For example, a scale factor of 0.2 means that diameter of the model cylindrical vessel is  of the diameter of the actual vessel, if the actual vessel is cylindrical in shape. For a rectangular vessel all the linear dimensions of the model vessel are 1/5 of the actual ones.