Experimental and Numerical Analysis of the Deformation of a Liquid Aluminum Free Surface Covered by an Oxide Layer During Induction Melting

Abstract

International audienceIn an induction furnace, as a result of electromagnetic forces, the free surface of a liquid aluminum bath deforms and takes the form of a dome. The oxide layer that forms spontaneously on the free surface of aluminum melts may also influence the deformation by exerting an additional friction force on the metal. A non-intrusive experimental technique-Structured Light Fringe Projection-was used to measure the complete surface deformation and its fluctuations, for a varying set of operating parameters-inductor current intensity and initial liquid metal filling level inside the crucible. For an axisymmetric geometry, numerical simulations were carried out to calculate in a single framework: (i) the electromagnetic forces using the A-V formulation, (ii) the free surface deformation using the Volume of Fluid method, and (iii) the turbulent stirring of the metal using a RANS-based k-omega model. The friction force due to the oxide layer was modeled by imposing a pseudo-wall condition on the free surface, which makes the interfacial velocity very small compared to the average liquid metal pool velocity. A marked impact on the dome height due to applied friction force is observed. Finally, comparisons between the predicted and measured domes are presented

Numerical study of the hydrodynamics in a two-phase induction melter for nuclear waste treatment under various operating parameters

“…The use of the contact probe method [33][34][35] is not feasible in this case due to the high temperature of the melt, and neither are the methods based on light projection [17,20], due to the presence of the opaque glass phase above the metal. Also, measurements based on the melting of a material in the liquids [11,28] are ineffective to measure the shape of the surface of the metal, because the materials will melt in the glass.…”

“…The problem of simulations of magnetohydrodynamics coupled with the cal-culation of the shape of the metallic charge is not new, and has been reported, for example, in metallurgy. Employed numerical methods were based on the mesh deformation [11][12][13][14] or used the volume of fluid (VOF) models [15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

“…Mostly, models based on Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) are used -e.g. k- [13,14,19,20,22], k-RNG [15,23], k-ω [11,24], or k-ω SST [16,17] -and sometimes Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used [21,23,25,26], despite the longer calculation times needed for this method. The calculations of the hydrodynamic and the electromagnetic parts are often performed sequentially and sometimes with two different software [16,20,23,25,26], allowing the use of finite elements for the electromagnetic part and finite volume for the fluid flow.…”

On numerical approximation of incompresible fluid flow with free surface influenced by surface tension

“…[1], [2], [3]. The kinematics and dynamics of the fluid interface plays an important role in many of these processes.…”

Numerical simulations of turbulent flow in an electromagnetically levitated metallic droplet using k-Ω SST and Reynolds stress models

“…ANSYS Fluent is used to obtain non-stationary solution of hydrodynamic equations coupled with calculations of shape of the droplet due to use of VOF model. Electromagnetic problem is solved with home-made module based on user-defined functions and implemented into ANSYS Fluent as an add-on library [9,10]. Use of only one software allows us to make modeling with unique calculation grid, i.e.…”