Modeling of Industrial Electric Arcs Using Different Plasma Gas Compositions

Abstract

Electric arcs are an important heat source in submerged arc furnaces that are used in the pyrometallurgical production of silicon. They are therefore of great interest to study so that the production process can be improved and made more efficient. Modeling of industrial arcs is a multiphysics problem that involves simultaneously solving several coupled physical phenomena, such as electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, and heat transfer, including radiative heat transfer from the plasma arc. Coupling fluid dynamics and electromagnetics is known as Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). Two MHD model implementations developed by the authors are used to simulate alternating current arcs with different plasma gas compositions. The thermophysical properties of each composition are calculated using specialized code as well as gathered from literature. We investigate the dependence of the results on both the MHD model used and the input plasma data for three argon data sets and compare the results to data obtained from laboratory experiments. Finally, we investigate furnace conditions using different ratios of SiO to CO gases.