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，对提取和精炼金属所用的化学过程进行更好的控制将有利于我国经济的整体利益。即使在某些过程运行多年之后，也很难预测重要化学反应的行为，并以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，在使用液态炉渣精炼液态金属的情况下，两种液体可能以不可预测和不受控制的方式混合未知的时间。有几个原因可能会发生这种情况，目前的工作解决其中两个。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反应。在精炼过程中，我们可能会有一个理想的反应和其他几个可能有助于或阻碍这个反应的反应。这些反应相互竞争，我们希望有帮助的反应赢得竞争。 目前的工作试图找到增强有益反应的环境，但要做到这一点，我们必须首先了解竞争的性质。 这在金属精炼中也很重要。瞬态反应不仅是金属生产中的一个问题，而且也存在于腐蚀中。硫酸是加拿大重要的工业化学品。用于储存和运输硫酸的不锈钢腐蚀的方式使得容器的寿命非常难以预测。腐蚀会周期性地开启和关闭，为了预测腐蚀速率，我们需要知道腐蚀开启的时间比例。我们的团队在理解这一点方面取得了很大进展，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中的腐蚀性能。

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.