The Behavior of Supersonic Jets Generated by Combination Gas in the Steelmaking Process

In the duplex steelmaking process, the oxygen flow rate is suppressed to reduce the increasing rate of the temperature in the molten bath, resulting in severe dynamic conditions. To improve the mixing effect of the molten bath, a Laval nozzle structure designed for combination gas has been proposed. In this research, five types of Laval nozzle structure have been built based on the combination gas content, and both numerical simulations and experiments are performed to analyze the flow field of the supersonic jet. The axial velocity and oxygen concentration were measured in the experiment, which agreed well with the numerically simulated data. The results show that both initial axial velocity and potential core length increase with the flow rate of combination gas. Further, applying a higher N₂ flow rate could improve the oxygen utilization rate at different ambient temperatures, but this issue increases the oxygen utilization rate; however, the latter can be reduced at higher ambient temperatures.