2018 Volume 104 Issue 10 Pages 567-576
In a continuous casting process, a mold powder layer consisting of a powder layer and a molten layer on molten steel is important to ensure a quality of steel. Therefore, measuring the thicknesses of the powder and molten layers is needed. In this study, a method to measure the thicknesses of each layer with microwave time domain measurement using VNA (Vector Network Analyzer) is proposed. Because a microwave is insensitive to dust and high temperature, the method has the possibility to measure the thicknesses of the powder and molten layers stably in a real field environment around the continuous casting process. Moreover, VNA can measure wideband frequency signals with high SN ratio. Thus, the method has high range resolution and SN ratio. The measurements of thicknesses of the powder layer on an aluminum plate and the mold powder layer consisting of the powder and molten layers were attempted using the method. As the results, it was shown that the method can measure the thickness of the powder layer on the aluminum plate with the error of 0.56 mm. It was also shown that the method has the ability to measure the thickness of the powder layer on the molten layer. Since the measurements were performed in a laboratory, the investigation of the applicability of the method to the real field environment is future work. The ability of the method to measure the thickness of the molten layer, on which the powder layer exists, should also be evaluated in the future.
