Beyond Ironmaking: Can Hydrogen Metallurgy Enable Low-Nitrogen EAF Steel?

Speaker

Dr Zhimin You

Abstract

Decarbonisation is driving a shift from BF-BOF long-process to EAF short-process steelmaking. The electric arc furnace (EAF) short route is moving from a niche pathway to a central platform for green steel, because it enable much lower CO2 emission, lower solid waste and flexible operation. However, this transition exposes bottleneck that receives far less attention than hydrogen-based ironmaking: nitrogen control. Scrap, arc plasma, refining and casting all can introduce or re-introduce nitrogen, while conventional foaming-slag, argon stirring and vacuum degassing mainly protect against pickup or remove nitrogen passively, often with limited kinetics. This seminar will trace the nitrogen challenge across the EAF–LF–RH/VD–CC chain and review current control strategies. It will then introduce a less-discussed direction in hydrogen metallurgy: using hydrogen not only for ironmaking but also as an active steelmaking/refining reagent. Hydrogen plasma can generate highly reactive H species that react with dissolved nitrogen to form NH3, enabling active denitrification under practical conditions. I will present our team’s progress in hydrogen-containing plasma refining, hollow-electrode gas injection, lab-scale mechanism studies and pilot-scale translation, and discuss how this could be integrated with hydrogen-based DRI, vacuum refining and full-protection casting. The key message is that hydrogen plasma may turn nitrogen control from a passive protection problem into an active removal opportunity, providing a new route for cost-effective, stable low-nitrogen green steel. The talk is intended to be accessible to researchers from metallurgy, minerals processing, materials and sustainability backgrounds.

Bio

Dr Zhimin You is an Associate Professor at the school of metallurgy, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China. His research focuses on green and low-carbon steelmaking, kinetic mechanisms in clean steel smelting, thermodynamic Modelling and database development of nitrogen-containing steel and alloy systems, and special steel design and development. He completed his MSc in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB) and PhD in Materials Engineering from McGill University.