The Electroslag Remelting (ESR) process concerns the use of a consumable metal electrode, which is used to melt through a slag layer into a water-cooled mold by applying an alternating electric current. The ESR process produces large ingots of a high quality. This is achieved by controlled solidification and chemical refinement. An understanding of the solidification, heat and fluid flow in the ESR process is essential in order to predict the presence of defects in the solidified ingot. Due to the transient nature of the multiphase, non-isothermal fluid flow problem with magneto-hydrodynamic effects, melting and solidification modeling is a complex task.
This paper presents the combination of two coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to simulate both the fluid flow in the slag layer, including metal droplet formation, and solidification in the metal pool. The simulation has been performed for Alloy 718 and compared to experimental data. The presented 3d-model is able to simulate both the steady state and the transient ESR process.