Professor Szekely made major contributions to our understanding of steel refining and currently this research area still remains vital as industry attempts to consistently produce ultra-clean steels with low contents of oxygen,sulfur,nitrogen and hydrogen.In order to produce ultra-clean steels recent developments have been aimed at a better understanding of the role of ladle,tundish and mold operations in clean steel manufacture.In this paper advances in our understanding of steel refining will be outlined and the current status of our knowledge of such processes as degassing,desulfurization and inclusion formation and elimination are discussed.It is clear that the approach pioneered by Szekely,a rigorous mathematical model of a process which includes all of the pertinent physical phenomena,has become the approach of choice for studying industrial processes.In this paper,it will be shown that our understanding of the physical phenomena associated with steel processing is not complete and many challenges remain.
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