Investigation of Solidification, Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow in Continuous Casting of Steel Using an Advanced Modeling Approach

An advanced approach for modeling solidification, heat transfer, and fluid flow is used to study an industrial bloom caster with a bifurcated submerged entry nozzle. The advantage of this approach is the increased accuracy from using temperature-dependent material properties and precise heat transfer boundary conditions. The computational domain encompasses the whole liquid pool and computational factors affecting the accuracy are analyzed. According to the results, severe shell thinning on the narrow faces is caused by impinging jets from the submerged entry nozzle, which are highly localized and affect the superheat distribution. Most of the superheat is dissipated in the mold, but the remainder is spread to a large area in the secondary cooling zone, which can only be investigated by coupled CFD models extending far enough. Heat transfer models based on the effective thermal conductivity method can be used to determine the end of the liquid pool and solid shell temperatures, but cannot capture the features of areas, where the liquid fraction is high.