My professorship covers the high-temperature processes for producing metals and the momentum, heat, and mass transfer phenomena involved in these processes. This also includes chemical reactions and their kinetics. The sustainable production of metals from poor and impure raw materials brings new challenges into the process.

Research activities focus on the behaviour of different elements in high-temperature processes, because as new raw material groups are brought in they introduce into the processes substances that have not been there before. In terms of the behaviour studied, attention is paid in particular to how the substances distribute into different products such as metals and slag, or through evaporation into gases and flue dust.

Another line of research is the modelling of processes’ transfer phenomena and kinetics, primarily with the use of commercial CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software. The basic phenomena can be modelled with the CFD tools, but the kinetics of the metallurgical reactions are added as submodels defined by the researchers and the required kinetic information is acquired through experimental research. I have two research groups that support and complement each other, one for experimental research and the other for computer modelling research. The objective of this is to find ways to develop the processes so that all the elements can completely be either stored, put to use, or safely discarded in a controlled manner.

Focus areas:

• Metallurgical processes, reactions and transport phenomena.
• Sustainable production and use of materials.
• Environmentally friendly and energy-efficient processing of metals
  from low grade and complex primary and secondary resources.