Silicon is produced in submerged arc furnaces which are heated by electric currents passing through the furnace. It is important to understand the distribution of heating within the furnace in order to accurately model the silicon production process, yet many existing studies neglect aspects of this current flow. In the present paper, we formulate a model that couples the electrical current to thermal, material flow and chemical processes in the furnace. We then exploit disparate timescales to homogenise the model over the timescale of the alternating current, deriving averaged equations for the slow evolution of the system. Our numerical simulations predict a minimum applied current that is required in order to obtain steady-state solutions of the homogenised model and show that for high enough applied currents, two spatially heterogeneous steady-state solutions exist, with distinct crater sizes. We show that the system evolves to the steady state with a larger crater radius and explain this behaviour in terms of the overall power balance typically found within a furnace. We find that the industrial practice of stoking furnaces increases the overall rate of material consumption in the furnace, thereby improving the efficiency of silicon production.

Our aim is to evidence new 3D composite diffractive structures whose effective permittivity tensor can exhibit very large positive or negative real eigenvalues. We use a reiterated homogenization procedure in which the first step consists in considering a bounded obstacle made of periodically disposed parallel high conducting metallic fibers of finite length and very thin cross section. As shown in [2], the resulting constitutive law is non-local. Then by reproducing periodically the same kind of obstacle at small scale, we obtain a local effective law described by a permittivity tensor that we make explicit as a function of the frequency. Due to internal resonances, the eigenvalues of this tensor have real part that change of sign and are possibly very large within some range of frequencies. Numerical simulations are shown.