9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

Changing market situations demand sustainable usage of new available technologies to support steel producers with highly flexible plant configurations and tools. Therefore investments are focused to optimize production costs and product quality with short-term return. Modular design of upgrade solutions provides an individual configuration of metallurgical process-optimization respecting holistically the steel making and casting route. One of the important developments in the last years is the integration of process parameters over the entire production route, starting from iron making till finishing process. This was also considered for casting plants through the usage of the chemical steel analysis data from secondary metallurgy as an input parameter set for the process model at the casting plant by DynaPhase phase transformation modelling. Target of use is to understand the steel grade perfectly in composition and to control the process accordingly with reduced process measuring efforts like measuring of final solidification at the strand for state of the art soft reduction. Further a reduction of energy costs on the one hand while improving product quality on the other hand was in the focus of our new developments, which results e.g. in the completely new secondary cooling system DynaJet Flex. This system does not need anymore any operation air and increases the cooling turn down rate to double, which contributes to the growing demands in special steel casting. This paper will give an overview beside the topics mentioned above on the new developments in continuous casting of the last two years with several results out of operation, as well as highlights on the Industry 4.0 setup of continuous caster process modelling with plant configuration.