Investigation of Non-Metallic Inclusions During Primary Melting of Specialty Steels

Specialty steel cleanliness can be influenced by the primary melting operations, e.g., vacuum induction melting, for steels that are remelted by vacuum arc remelting. This work used automated inclusion analysis to investigate inclusions during these processes and their effect on downstream processing. Description of inclusion evolution is often aided by computational thermodynamics calculations, and some aspects of deoxidation equilibria at temperatures approximately 1,700°C that are relevant to these primary melting operations will be discussed.