9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

The application of magnetohydrodynamics in the continuous casting of steel enables improved control of the quality of the strand. The most common applications are electromagnetic braking (EMBR) and electromagnetic stirring (EMS). The former slows the flow by applying a static magnetic field and thus improves the steel flow pattern, reduces the velocity and the turbulence of the flow, increases the cleanliness of the material, improves the surface quality and reduces the number of inclusions, whereas the latter stirs the flow by applying an alternating magnetic field and thus improves the quality of the strand, reduces the surface and subsurface defects, enhances the solidification and reduces the number of breakouts. In this contribution EMBR and EMS in a continuous-casting process is considered. The in-house solver employing local radial basis function collocation method (LRBFCM) is used for the solution of coupled mass, energy, turbulent fluid flow, species and electromagnetic field equations. The explicit Euler time-stepping scheme and the collocation with multiquadrics radial basis functions on the five-noded overlapping influence domains are used to obtain the solution of the partial differential equations. A low Reynolds number turbulence model is used to describe the fluid flow, whereas the fractional step method is used to solve the pressure-velocity coupling. The method has been thoroughly tested in several test cases. In the presentation the influence of the application of electromagnetic braking and stiring on the temperature, flow field and macro-segregation in the continuous-casting process for carbon steel is presented.