State of the Art in Control of Inclusions, Their Characterization, and Future Requirements

Because of the growing demand of cleaner and defect-free steels, faster and more reliable offline steel cleanliness determination methods combined with online techniques are finding increasing usage to study steel refining and casting issues. Because a single-steel characterization technique is not sufficient to provide answers to all process problems, a combination of these techniques is often used to find a customized solution of the problem. This article reviews the past experiences on steel cleanliness examination to standardize the inclusion-characterization techniques and their applications for both experienced and novice researchers. The article also proposes a suite of techniques as a reference tool to facilitate clean steelmaking research at ArcelorMittal Group more effectively in the future. Examples of use of automated scanning electron microscopy and pulse discrimination analysis are provided.