Computational Modelling of Metallurgical Processes: Achievements and Challenges

Extractive metallurgical processes rate amongst the most complex from the perspective of computational modeling. They typically involve multi-phase and multi-component fluid flow in very complex geometries, heat transfer driven by a number of interacting phenomena, solid-liquid-gaseous phase change and mass transfer together with complex thermodynamics and associated chemical reactions. Beyond the model building itself, key challenges have always involved being able to identify the phenomena present together with interactions to characterize processes and experimental laboratory and plant data to parameterize the arising models — it is in this milieu, which require considerable process understanding and subtlety of thought, that David Robertson has made his contributions.We will review the achievements, over the last couple of decades, in computational modeling of extractive metallurgical processes and address some of the remaining challenges to enable simulation based process design, as we move through the 21th century.