Assessment of Cooling Conditions of a Continuous Casting Machine for Steel Billets Based on Surface Temperature Measurements

Abstract

For the correct simulation of solidification and temperature evolution in the continuous casting of steel, the determination of boundary conditions describing the heat-transfer phenomena through the strand surface, in each cooling zone of the casting machine, is extremely important. These boundary conditions are usually expressed as heat fluxes or heat transfer coefficients. In the present study, the surface temperature of the steel billet was experimentally determined in a steelmaking plant by infrared pyrometers positioned along the secondary cooling zone during real operation of a continuous casting machine. These data were used as input information into an Inverse Heat Transfer Code, implemented in this work, in order to permit the heat transfer coefficients of each spray cooling zone to be determined. The resulting simulations of temperature evolution during continuous casting have shown that the solidification was not complete at the unbending point and that there was a risk of breakout at the mold exit under the adopted operating conditions.