A review on bath fluid flow stirring technologies in EAF steelmaking

In the contemporary electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking industry, increasing contents and temperature homogenization via fluid flow stirring is found to be an effective method of improving production quality and smelting efficiency. It is a trend for different factories with bowl-shaped furnaces to apply the bath fluidity enhancement technology. EAF has plenty of advantages in modern steelmaking industry, and the improvements on the EAF steelmaking process have come up with two major tasks, namely reduction in energy consumption and tap-to-tap time. The latter task requires an essential understanding of every phase in EAF steelmaking process. The flat bath phase with poor bath fluid flow was crucial to the product quality and metallurgical efficiency considering EAF’s bowl-shaped structure. The research of three stirring bath methods, oxygen jets injection, electromagnetic stirring, and bottom blowing, were introduced, and then the detailed parameters of each method with their influences on molten bath fluidity were presented.