In continuous casting process, solidification should evenly proceed to have as good steel quality as possible. Molten steel starts to solidify in a water-cooled mold to create solidified shell followed by shell growth and termination in a secondary water cooling zone. Visualization of the flow pattern of spray water greatly helps to analyze how to have even shell. Computational fluid dynamics is useful represented by the grid based methods of FVM, FDM, and FEM. However, they are not appropriate for simulation of spray water flow because of complex free surfaces. So, the particle based method of MPS has been applied. A typical roll arrangement was modeled where spray water flow was particularly focused on. As a result, standing water on rolls overflows according to the water flow rate of spray accounted for in this study. Accuracy of the numerical model has been verified by water model experiments equipped by acrylic plates, rolls and spray nozzles. The computational results with a practical condition agreed well with the experimental results. Heat transfer coefficients between water and slab surface were estimated by the calculated results to simulate how solidification proceeded in practice. It was found that uneven water flow significantly affected unevenness in temperature distribution of a slab.
The growth and the deformation of the solidifying steel shell in the continuous casting process were calculated considering the taper of the mold's narrow face. The mechanism of uneven shell growth in the mold was discussed by using computational method and observations of the shell at various operating conditions such as taper and slab width. It was found that the shell at the bottom of the mold becomes uneven when the narrow face taper is insufficient. The increase of taper is effective to even shell growth, but excessive taper causes wear of mold's copper plate and breakout of the shell. To solve these problems, various kinds of mold taper design such as multiple and parabolic have been developed and adopted to molds' narrow faces. At the actual operation of continuous casting, many kinds of steel grades are cast in various casting speed and width at the same mold. So, the online change of the tilt of the narrow face is done according to the operating condition. When applying multiple taper design to this width changing type mold for slab, the problem is that the rate of upper or lower taper changes in different slab width. In this paper, the relationship between multiple taper and the uniformity of the shell growth was discussed considering slab width quantitatively by using computational model and observed shell thickness of slab. By using the developed calculation models, the multiple taper designs were optimized and applied to the actual continuous casting molds' narrow faces.
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