Metallurgical Research & Technology 2022 Best Paper Award (May 2023)

In free access!

We are delighted to announce the winner of the Metallurgical Research & Technology 2022 Best Paper Award.

The Metallurgical Research & Technology Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with research and/or industrial aspects in metallurgy and bringing an outstanding contribution to the field. All articles published during the current year prior to the award, including Short Communications, Regular articles, Reviews and Topical contributions, can be considered for an award. The editorial committee meets every year, in December, to judge the best papers according to the criteria of originality, innovation, significance to the research community, industrial relevance, technical excellence, impact, and clarity of presentation.

The authors of the awarded articles are offered a book from the EDP Sciences catalogue. In addition, they are given the possibility to publish a press release about their work and/or their laboratory/team. Finally, the selected articles are turned into free access so that all readers can have a chance to read them.

First prize winner

Nelson Joubert, Pascal Gardin, Stéphane Popinet and Stéphane Zaleski for their article "Experimental and numerical modelling of mass transfer in a refining ladle", published in Metall. Res. Technol. 119, 109 (2022).

Mass transfer between liquid steel and slag is an important physical phenomenon during secondary metallurgy for prediction of the chemical reaction rate and adjustment of liquid steel composition. We proposed to study this phenomenon by using a water experiment aiming to reproduce an argon-gas bottom-blown ladle and perform Direct Numerical Simulations of the experiment. The novelty of our numerical approach involves the simulation of the three-phase flow and at the same time the mass transfer part using a three-dimensional dynamic adaptative mesh solver called Basilisk. The experimental mass transfer configuration is particularly hard to reproduce numerically. Indeed, because of large Schmidt and Reynolds numbers, it requires extremely small cell sizes to resolve the concentration boundary layers.

About the authors

Nelson Joubert is a research engineer. He did his PhD under the supervision of Stéphane Zaleski and Stéphane Popinet at the Institut Jean le Rond d’Alembert of Sorbonne Université, Paris and with the collaboration of Pascal Gardin at ArcelorMittal R&D campus, Maizières-Lès-Metz. After obtaining his PhD in February 2021, he followed his works during a postdoctoral position at the Institut Jean Le Rond d’Alembert under the supervision of Stéphane Zaleski until December 2021. He realized both the experimental and numerical part in the presented paper.

Pascal Gardin is Scientific Relations Director, Maizières Campus, in charge of developing the scientific partnership aligned with the Group strategy. In parallel, he is also appointed as Group Expert in the field of Fluid Mechanics, in charge of developing the Fluid Mechanics network and maintaining this Key Expertise at efficient level.

Stéphane Popinet is a Directeur de Recherche at CNRS, based at Institut Jean le Rond d'Alembert of Sorbonne Université, Paris. After receiving a PhD in fluid mechanics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2000, he was a research scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research (NIWA), New Zealand, until 2013. He is interested in the application of numerical methods for fluid mechanics to understand a range of physical phenomena including: multiphase ocean/atmosphere transfers, granular materials, microfluidics, tsunamis and waves. He is also the author of the popular numerical libraries for fluid mechanics Gerris and Basilisk and has been a long-time advocate for open and collaborative science.

Stéphane Zaleski is Professor of Mechanics at Sorbonne Université and member of the “Institut Jean Le Rond d’Alembert”. After early years at the Physics Laboratory of ENS Paris where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Yves Pomeau, and at the applied math group of MIT he joined the Mechanics group at University of Paris 6. He investigates numerical methods for multiphase flows with applications to atomization, cavitation, porous media flow, nucleate boiling, hydrometallurgy, moving contact lines and droplet impact, including several variants of the Volume of Fluid method, the Edge Based Interface Tracking method, the Diffuse Interface method and Molecular Dynamics. He has written several computer codes for the simulation of two-phase flow including PARIS Simulator (with D. Fuster, Y. Ling, R. Scardovelli and G. Tryggvason) and is an active user of the basilisk platform. Recently he applied these techniques to the study of Covid-19 airborne transmission by micron-sized droplets. He is Associate Editor of J. Comput. Phys. and of Computers and Fluids. He leads the ERC-Advanced project TRUFLOW on mass transfer at large Schmidt numbers and is a member of Institut Universitaire de France.