9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

In the secondary cooling zone of the continuous casting process the steel is cooled down by water and water/air nozzles. The cooling has to be sufficient enough to ensure a certain shell thickness and finally the complete solidification of the material. Further a controlled and uniform cooling strategy is important to minimize the amount of defects in the solidified steel. To determine the cooling characteristics of different nozzles at different operation parameters the Nozzle Measuring Stand (NMS) at Montanuniverstät Leoben is used. In the first part of this work the measuring principle of the NMS is explained. Secondly the influence of different cooling parameters is discussed. Therefor the water distribution and the heat transfer coefficient for a single nozzle type were measured using the NMS. To show the change in cooling intensity over the width of the spray, the HTC was determined at several positions. Of particular interest is the area of overlapping. In this point two sprays interact with each other what can lead to a significant variation in water distribution and HTC. The modified process parameters for this investigation were the nozzle distances, water flow, air pressure and casting velocity.