In the analysis of the converter canning process, there have been a lot of progresses in stress prediction for the converter shell and mat pressure. However, stress prediction for the substrate, which is the most critical for the converter durability, has been less studied in the finite element analysis approach.
Substrate is made of a lot of cell structure with thin walls. Ideally, it is preferred to mesh the every single wall with solid elements to have a better analysis prediction. However, due to the limited computer resources, it is difficult to create it with detail model because it needs a lot of elements.
In this paper, the stress in the substrate during the canning process for the clamshell and tourniquet type is predicted based on the equivalent orthotropic solid element. A detailed cell for ceramic substrate and coating is modeled with enough solid elements to represent coating fillet radius. A new failure criterion is proposed for the substrate failure and new method is suggested to relate the stress from the equivalent solid element to the stress in the detailed microstructure model. From this method, the stress is evaluated from the cell structure and the possible crack locations for the substrate are predicted by introducing the failure index number.