Numerical Study of Turbulent Flows and Heat Transfer in Coupled Industrial-Scale Tundish of a Continuous Casting Material in Steel Production

Abstract

This chapter describes the numerical simulations of a coupled industrial scale of the tundish and continuous casting process. The governing equations are presented, and the numerical procedure is discussed in a common framework. The coupled solutions are presented for the transient turbulent flows within the tundish, solidifying zone and extracting regions with the coupling phenomena of heat and mass transfer. The tundish region flow and refractory are calculated using the inlet and outlet boundary conditions in order to estimate the filling phenomena. The transitions and cooling zones for the thin slab continuous casting process are designed to account for the control of the solidified skin in order to avoid breakout. We compared the numerical predictions of the temperatures with industrial monitoring data for a reference case in order to verify the consistence of the model predictions. A parallel version of the numerical code is proposed aiming to improve the computation time keeping numerical accuracy.