Transient phenomena in slag reactions and corrosion

金属工业是加拿大经济的一个主要组成部分，更好地控制提取和精炼金属所用的化学过程将有利于我国经济的全面发展。即使经过多年的某些过程的运行，也很难预测重要的化学反应的行为，并以一种足够定量的方式来确保最佳性能。这主要是因为在反应过程中重要的条件发生了变化。例如，在使用液态渣提炼液态金属的情况下，这两种液体可能在未知的时间内以不可预测和不受控制的方式混合。这可能发生的原因有几个，目前的工作解决了其中两个。这将导致更好地控制炼钢和精炼过程。瞬态行为的另一个来源是竞争性反应。在精炼过程中，我们可能有一个理想的反应和其他几个可能有助于或阻碍该反应的反应。这些反应相互竞争，我们希望有帮助的反应赢得竞争。目前的工作旨在找到能够增强有益反应而不是有害反应的环境，但要做到这一点，我们必须首先了解竞争的本质。这在金属精炼中也很重要。瞬态反应不仅是金属生产中的问题，而且在腐蚀中也存在。硫酸是加拿大重要的主要工业化学品。用于储存和运输硫酸的不锈钢会被腐蚀，这使得容器的使用寿命很难预测。腐蚀会周期性地自我开启和关闭，为了预测腐蚀速率，我们需要知道腐蚀开启的时间。我们的团队在理解这一点上取得了很大的进展，在这个项目的过程中，我们将开发一种方法来精确预测这些振荡系统的腐蚀性能。

The metals industry is a major component of the Canadian economy and to develop better control of the chemical processes used in extracting and refining metal will be to the overall benefit of our economy. Even after many years of running certain processes, it is difficult to predict the behaviour of important chemical reactions and to do this in a way that is sufficiently quantitative to ensure optimum performance. Largely this is because important conditions change during the reaction. For example, in the case of refining a liquid metal using a liquid slag, the two liquids may mix in an unpredictable and uncontrolled way for an unknown time. There are several reasons why this might happen and the current work addresses two of them. This should lead to better control of steelmaking and refining processes. Another source of transient behaviour is competing reactions. In refining we may have a desirable reaction and several others that may help or hinder this reaction. These reactions compete with each other and we would want the helpful reactions to win the competition. The current work seeks to find circumstances that enhance the beneficial reactions over those that are detrimental, but to do this we must first understand the nature of the competition. This is also important in metal refining. Transient reactions are not only an issue in metals production but are also found in corrosion. Sulphuric acid is a major industrial chemical of importance to Canada. The stainless steels used to store and transport sulphuric acid corrode in a way that makes the lifetime of the container very difficult to predict. The corrosion switches itself on and off periodically and to predict the corrosion rate we need to know for what fraction of time the corrosion is switched on. Our group has made excellent progress in understanding this and over the course of this project will develop a method to precisely predict corrosion performance in these oscillating systems.