9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

Increasing quality requirements on continuous casting products lead to the necessity of getting detailed information on physical phenomena occurring in the mould. Temperature measurements help to control the beginning solidification, e.g. with a sticker warning system. Up to now measurements with thermocouples are the state-of-the-art. An alternative is presented here with a fibre optical sensor system. This system shows a high resolution in space and time. Additionally less space is necessary in comparison to thermocouples. A thick slab mould was equipped with two sensor rows including 10 measuring positions each. In the meniscus area the distances between measuring positions were lowered, so the operator of the casting machine was enabled to monitor the meniscus precisely based on the temperature results. Overall two measuring campaigns were performed, one with the initial mould geometry and one with an adjusted mould geometry aiming at a homogenised heat transfer in the mould corners.