9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

Coupled thermal and mechanical model of continuous casting of thin slabs produced at OMK CSP was further developed. The model is constructed in the ANSYS Mechanical APDL software. For the tapered funnel mold, thermal 3D and structural 2D task was formulated and solved. For the secondary cooling zone, both thermal and structural problems were set as 2D models. The model is shown to represent sufficiently well important effects intrinsic to the continuous casting process. These are transversal and longitudinal deformation of solidifying shell in the mold, bulging, tension, bending and “soft” reduction under the secondary cooling. Undefined heat transfer parameters describing the mold heat fluxes were determined via solving an inverse problem with some simplifications using thermocouple data of the mold faces. In the secondary cooling zone well known approaches were used to set and check the thermal model. To find the critical points of a cast steel, enthalpy of metallic system, solidification kinetics, volumetric changes, chemical composition of transforming phases as functions of current temperature and initial composition of the steel Thermo-Calc Software is used. This made it possible to evaluate for a first approximation the composition of the phases and their volume fraction (for example, carbonitrides, AlN, MnS) in a solidifying shell relative to the caster important geometric points. The model is also intended to precise the thresholds in the rules of the automatic surface quality system of the casting machine.