Agglomeration behaviors of different types of complex TiN inclusions in high titanium wear resistant steel

Large-sized titanium-containing inclusion clusters seriously affect the continuous casting and performance of high titanium wear-resistant steel. In the current work, thermodynamic calculations were firstly conducted to predict the formation of various complex TiN inclusions, viz, TiOx-TiN, Al2O3-TiN and LaAlO3-TiN. Based on that, laboratory-scale experiments were designed to prepare samples containing a single type of complex TiN inclusions. The agglomeration characterizes of different complex inclusions were compared by combing in-situ observation based on confocal laser scanning microscopy and Newtonian motion equation. Furthermore, the Kralchevsky-Paunov model was used to study the influences of density and size on the agglomeration behavior of complex TiN inclusions. The result shows that the attractive force between TiOx-TiN complex inclusions increases from 1.93×10-18 to 4.34×10-17 N, while it was 3.41×10-17 to 5.12×10-16 N for Al2O3-TiN complex inclusions and 6.42×10-18 to 1.14×10-16 N for LaAlO3-TiN inclusions. Based on the experimental results and theoretical calculation, the agglomeration tendency of Al2O3-TiN is the strongest due to the considered size and compared to the TiOx-TiN inclusions, the stronger agglomeration tendency of LaAlO3-TiN ones can be attributed to their higher density.