Tundish Metallurgy: Towards Increased Productivity and Clean Steel

Tundish in the steelmaking circuitry, like BOF/EAF and ladles, plays a pivotal role in determining plant performance and steel quality. Thus, beyond its traditional role as a buffer vessel, a steelmaking tundish is currently designed and operated to ensure maximum yield, superior cleanliness, negligible energy and materials losses and longer life. Naturally therefore, modern day steelmakers are emphasizing tundish management and practice. Adequate understanding of the physical, chemical and thermal interactions among steel, slag, gas and refractory phases is a pre-requisite to fully exploit the potential of any given tundish system. In the present work, a brief account of the theory of tundish processing is first presented. Following such, phenomena such as, inclusion removal, temperature drop, skull losses, grade intermixing as well as slag emulsification and entrainment in different tundish systems are discussed. In such context, decade long association with half a dozen domestic steel industries namely, JSW-Ispat, JSPL, JSW, RINL, Hospet steel and MUSCO is highlighted and our approach and efforts towards tundish process performance enhancement demonstrated.