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Description
Continuous casting is nowadays the world leading technology for the steel production. The thin slab casting (TSC) is featured by a slab shape close to the final products, which are casted at a high speed with the fast solidification rate. The quality of the thin slabs strongly depends on the uniformity of the turbulent flow, the super-heat distribution, and the growth of the solidified shell after the hot steel is fed into a funnel-shaped mold via a submerged entry nozzle (SEN). In most of the studies the focus is typically made on the calmness of the meniscus, the local remelting of the solidifying shell, the probability of slag and non-metallic inclusions entrapment, etc. It is commonly assumed that the SEN is properly arranged, and the melt inflow is symmetric. However, in reality due to misalignment or clogging of the nozzle, an asymmetric flow pattern can develop. In the present study the asymmetry of the melt flow is imposed with a partial SEN clogging: (a) an assumption of the local porous zone is employed to reflect the presence of the clog material; (b) the resistance of the clog is varied from the low to the high values. The solidification during TSC is modeled including the effects of the turbulent flow. The variation of the flow pattern and the solid shell thickness is studied for different permeability values of the SEN clogging. These effects are considered with and without the applied electromagnetic brake (EMBr), which is simulated using an magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) model, developed within the open-source CFD package OpenFOAM®.