Improved collision modelling for liquid metal droplets in a copper slag cleaning process

Abstract

Collision and coalescence among liquid metal droplets in a slag cleaning process enhanced by electromagnetic stirring were numerically studied. A hybrid collision algorithm was implemented to calculate the collision probability, which overcomes the mesh-dependency problem in a pure stochastic algorithm and is adaptive to both homogeneous and inhomogeneous cases. Theoretical analyses and numerical simulations based on the Volume-of-Fluid method were carried out in order to predict the result of droplet collisions, which are important for the copper slag cleaning process.. Based on the numerical results, a new regime map, which is specific to the liquid metal droplet collisions driven by shear slag flow at low capillary numbers, is provided.