Design and analysis of a suction mechanism for the vacuum degassing process

ABSTRACT

The vacuum degassing (VD) process is one of the prominent processes in the secondary metallurgy thereby improving the quality of the produced steel. The combination of steam ejectors and liquid-ring pumps (LRPs) is a prevalent mechanism for creating a deep vacuum in industrial applications including the VD process. The objective of this study is to design the ejector system for the VD process of a 20-ton furnace with such a mechanism. Through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with experimental data validation, the effects of geometrical parameters are investigated and reported for selecting the optimized values. Among the potential geometric parameters, the most influential ones are described including nozzle inlet radius, mixing chamber radius, and area ratio. Apart from satisfying the process requirements, the ejector system should elevate the pressure to the value at which LRPs can operate effectively. Given the mentioned demands, three ejectors are designed and simulated to operate serially.

KEYWORDS:

• Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• vacuum degassing (VD)
• optimization
• ejectors
• steelmaking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).