Inert gas bubbling through porous plugs is commonly used to stir molten steel in ladle to ensure homogeneity and promote chemical reactions between slag and metal phases. Monitoring the behaviour of the slag is very important to ensure the steel quality, and an online analysis for the ladle eye area is crucial to control and optimise the process. A rapid image analysis technique, which is based on the intensity difference between the RGB channels of the same digital image, has been developed. Both cold model and industrial images have been tested, and the results show that this technique can effectively calculate the ladle eye area in less than 0·1 s/frame.
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