Heat Transfer Modelling of Continuous Casting: Numerical Considerations, Laboratory Measurements and Plant Validation

ABSTRACT: Accurate heat transfer models of continuous casting require accurate measurements to characterize the boundary conditions, temperature and alloy-dependent thermal properties, optimization of numerical errors caused by model discretization, and validation with plant measurements. Recent efforts of an international collaboration on all of these aspects are summarized, focusing on modelling of secondary cooling, spray cooling measurements, the effect of materials properties and analysis of the simulation results based on experimental and theoretical considerations. Spray cooling laboratory measurements are conducted using a collector system for the shape of spray water distribution and both transient and novel steady-state apparatus to obtain the corresponding heat transfer coefficients. The steady-state measurements indicate significantly higher values than the transient measurements. 1