An understanding of slag/carbon interaction is of great importance due to their extensive application in a number of metallurgical process, such as blast furnace ironmaking and direct reduction ironmaking processes. Along with the improvement of blast furnace operation, many attentions have been also paid for direct reduction ironmaking processes to meet the recent severe supply conditions of resources, energy and environmental restriction. Most of direct reduction ironmaking processes had generally used natural gas as a reducing agent so that ironmaking plants were forced to locate near the natural gas production area. This restriction deteriorated the versatility of the process and market competitiveness.Thus the development of the direct reduction ironmaking process based on coal is strongly asked for, since the coal production areas are widely spread all over the world and the cost is quite low compared with natural gas. Many efforts were paid and several industrial processes 7-9) have been working now to meet these demands. Control of the reaction between coal and liquid iron or coal and formed slag (carburization reaction and/or slag/metal separation) is very critical in these processes to make the stable operation and improve its production efficiency.Recently, Ohno et al. 8,9) found that the carburization re-