Raman Spectroscopic Study of the Structure of CaO-SiO2-Al2O3-Based Flux

Due to the [Al] reaction with the CaO-SiO2-based mold flux used in the high-Al steels continuous casting processes, decreasing the SiO2 content is decreased and the Al2O3 content in mold flux is increased, thus converting the original CaO-SiO2-based mold flux into a CaO-SiO2-Al2O3-based mold flux. This conversion of the mold fluxes can cause the problem of high-Al steels continuous casting. Hence, study on the structural characteristics of the CaO-SiO2-Al2O3- based mold flux can provide fundamental data to design optimum fluxes for high Al-containing steels. In this paper, the structural characteristics of the CaO-SiO2-based and CaO-SiO2-Al2O3-based flux were studied by Raman spectroscopy. The results have shown that, the CaO-SiO2-based flux was the silicate structure whose main micro-structure units were Q0, Q1, Q2 and Q3. The network breakers prefer to depolymerize the silicate network in CaO-SiO2-Al2O3-based flux. While the CaO-SiO2-Al2O3-based flux with low SiO2 content, the [AlO4] tetrahedron was entered the silicate network and the melt converted into the aluminosilicates structure, the formation of Al-O-Al linkages and Si-O-Al linkages increased the degree of disorder of network. The results of Li2O replace Na2O and CaO replace MgO have shown that the ions will influence the formation of [AlO4] tetrahedron linkages. CaF2 replace CaO shown that the polymerization degree of mold slag decreased first, and then increased with the content of CaF2 more than 13 mol%. So, the influences of the ions type and the ions content on the structure were both need considered while designing the CaO-SiO2-Al2O3-based flux.