9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

Corner crack is one of the main defects which affects continuous casting slabs. It downgrades slab surface quality and requires further scarfing which is costly and time consuming. Chamfer mold technology is a new mold design which may reduce corner cracks occurrence during continuous casting process. Conventional continuous slab casting uses rectangular shape mold with 90°corners. Chamfer continuous casting mold exhibits a rectangular shape but with chamfer corners. Assessment of this chamfer mold concerning corner cracks occurrence is done thanks to numerical simulation with a 3D thermomechanical finite element software called Thercast®. A comparison between conventional and chamfer mold simulations is done in terms of stress and temperature distribution in slab corners. Results show that chamfer corners lead to an increase of temperature and a decrease of stress at corners which may effectively decrease corner cracks occurrence. In a second step, the influence of chamfer geometry parameters (angle and length) on stress and temperature distribution is investigated and discussed.