Steelmaking has shown an increasing concern toward nonmetallic inclusions, leading to new technologies in the secondary metallurgy of steel. Although the typical inclusion removal procedure is by injecting inert gas into the ladle, this vessel does not fulfill all the requirements to accept a porous structure tailored to produce “clean steels.” Consequently, the spotlight has moved to the tundish, the last vessel before solidification, in which gas injection can continuously operate. Therefore, this work focuses on understanding the influence of typical gas flow rates (10–60 NL/min) on the kinetics of inclusion flotation, considering two bubble diameters (0.6 and 1.1 mm). For this purpose, experimental measurements were conducted in a water model, where glass hollow spheres played the role of inclusions, and their concentration was fitted by an exponential decay. In general, injecting bubbles into the system contributed positively to a faster and greater flotation of particles. The smaller bubbles led to a higher maximum efficiency, whereas the larger ones allowed a shorter time scale (i.e., a faster removal), defining a trade-off to tune the bubble size. Regarding the gas flow rate, the results indicate an optimum range to decrease the time scale, and suggestions for bubble curtains in tundishes are drawn.

Beyond metallurgical aspects to yield clean steels, purging plugs in the ladle and beams in the tundish play a key role in generating bubble curtains to maximize the nonmetallic inclusion removal in a short time. However, technical challenges might be noted on how to control the bubble size through the design of the purging device and how to predict the kinetics of induced flotation for each bubble plume. Therefore, this work investigated two bubble size distributions and their effect on the kinetics of particle removal in a water model, providing insights into the design of purging devices for clean steelmaking.

Ceramic refractory bubbling devices may be applied in the steel ladle to induce the flotation of non-metallic inclusions to the slag phase. These inclusions have many origins along the steelmaking process and induce a detrimental effect on the mechanical properties of these metals. Therefore, the design of high-performance ceramic plugs relies on understanding the fundamentals of non-metallic inclusions captured by the gas bubbles. This study investigated the flotation dynamics of hydrophobic and hydrophilic hollow glass particles through experimentation using a water model and quantifying the particle concentration via light scattering. Both types of particles exhibited a comparable natural flotation removal rate, whereas a 40% increase for hydrophobic particles was observed when introducing 1.1 mm bubbles (at 25 NL/h) enhancing the efficiency from 43.1% to 65.2%. For hydrophilic particles, the efficiency increased from 59.1% to 86.2% when bubbles were injected into the system, whereas the removal rate decreased by 2.1-fold. The consequence of the practice of inert gas purging to remove non-metallic inclusions is also discussed.