Speaker
Description
The quality of steel produced by a continuous caster depends on the flow condition during initial solidification in the mould. While the understanding of the flow and its effects is highly desirable, high temperature, opaqueness of the liquid steel and harsh conditions during the production limit viable measurement methods. Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography (CIFT) can provide information about the dominant flow structure in the mould in real time. This information can be used in a control loop for the Electromagnetic Brake (EMBr). Due to the inductive nature of CIFT, every change of the magnetic field strength of the EMBr has a strong influence on the measurements. Changing the strength of the EMBr alters the magnetization vector in its ferromagnetic yoke, which, in turn, generates a signal up to a thousand times higher than the flow induced magnetic field.
In this paper, we present a way to compensate these effects of EMBr on CIFT by filling a database containing compensation values. We will also present the preliminary results of a controller that utilizes CIFT and EMBr to actively control the flow in the mould during casting. The experiments are conducted on the Mini-LIMMCAST facility, a laboratory model of the mould of a continuous caster with the rectangular cross-section of 300 $\times$ 30 mm$^2$. It is operated with the eutectic alloy GaInSn.