Iron and Steel Division - The Activity of Sulphur in Liquid Steel: The Influence of Copper (With Discussion)

IN a recent investigation, carried out at the Institute for the Study of Metals, the affinity of sul-phur for iron, copper, and manganese was studied over the temperature range 700" to 1300°C.' It was found that copper exhibits a rather high affinity for sulphur, especially at higher temperatures; and attention was called to the possibility that copper when present together with sulphur in liquid steel would tend to lower the chemical activity of sulphur and thus interfere with the desulphurization process. It was clear, however, that the data for the equilibrium between pure copper and pure copper sulphide (Cu2S) could not give any quantitative information about the effect of copper when dissolved in liquid steel. The present work is concerned with the activity of sulphur in the diluted range of the binary iron-sulphur system, and with the influence of small amounts of copper on this sulphur activity. This investigation is in principle based on the same method previously described for the binary metal-sulphur studies;1,2 namely, reaction with hydrogen to form hydrogen sulphide. The equilibrium ratio PH2s/Ph2 in the equilibrium gas mixture is, for a given temperature, directly proportional to the sulphur activity. The activity of sulphur in liquid iron has previously been studied by Chipman and Ta Li,3 White and Skelly,4 and recently by Sherman, Elvander, and Chipman.5 Morris and Williams6 have studied the effect of added silicon, and Kitchener, Bockris and Liberman,7 and recently Morris and Buehl,8 the effect of added carbon on the sulphur activity. In present day steelmaking processes the steel bath contains between 0.01 and 0.1 pct sulphur, and the copper content may be as high as 0.5 pct. The equi-librium gas ratio (H2S/H2) would, for such a low-sulphur content, be too low to be measured with the experimental technique we use. It has been shown by previous investigators that the H2S/H2 ratio is closely proportional to the sulphur content up to about 1 pct sulphur. The sulphur activity at very low-sulphur content can therefore be calculated by linear interpolation between 0 and 1 pct sulphur. In order to show the general trend with increasing sulphur content, the present work has been carried out to about 3.5 pct sulphur. As the effect of copper was assumed to be more a function of the Cu/S ratio than of the absolute copper content, the runs with copper were made for certain constant values for this ratio.