Speaker
Description
Continuous casting is an important process to transform molten metal into solid. During secondary cooling of steel, arrays of spray nozzles are used to remove heat from the slab letting it solidify. Effective heat removal from the slab without causing slab cracking and deformation is desired. Air-mist spray is one of the promising technologies to achieve high-rate heat transfer due to the significant reduction in water droplet size, as a result of the strong air-water interaction in the spray nozzle. With the aid of three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulations, the present study would numerically analyze air-mist spray by a flat-fan atomizer and the impingement heat transfer between droplets and the slab surface during the secondary cooling process. Parametric studies would be conducted to investigate the effects of some important casting parameters such as air pressure, water flow rate, standoff distance and casting speed on the heat removal from the steel slab. A cooling water temperature and slab surface temperature of 300K and 1473K respectively would be used and the heat transfer coefficients would be evaluated for each of the casting condition to see the effect of these operating conditions on the spray cooling heat transfer coefficient. The numerical study would be done using ANSYS FLUENT 2020R1. The results from this study would provide useful information in the continuous casting operations and optimization.