The central issue in stainless steelmaking is the difficulty of oxidizing carbon from molten steel without also oxidizing large proportions of expensive chromium. This can, however, be achieved by reducing the partial pressure of the gaseous product of carbon oxidation, carbon monoxide. Modern stainless steelmaking is dominated by duplex processes, which prepare a high carbon melt in an electrical arc furnace and then decarburize the melt in a converter, such as a 'vacuum oxygen

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... converter in which oxygen is blown onto the melt in an evacuated chamber. This study was done in EICO to investigate effect of initial condition on results of vacuum oxygen decarburization (VOD) process to produce low carbon steel. In this study different parameters such as initial analysis of melt, weight of melt, temperature of melt before delivery to vacuum vessel and oxygen gas blowing rate were employed. The calculated final metal composition and temperature are in reasonable agreement with the predictions. KEY WORDS: stainless steel, vacuum oxygen decarburization, vacuum carbon deoxidation, secondary decarburization.