2015 Volume 55 Issue 5 Pages 976-983
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.
