Comparative performance of jet and spray impingement cooling in steel strip run-out table: experimental results

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a comparative performance study of cooling techniques based on air-assisted water spray and jet impingement for heated moving metallic plates. To achieve the heat transfer characteristics of spray and jet cooling methods, an experimental setup was developed to accommodate the spray (SIC) and jet impingement cooling (JIC). The temperature at different locations of the plate was taken by K-type thermocouples embedded therein and attached to CHINO-make data acquisition system. The cooling curves obtained were utilised for computing the cooling rates. Experiments were conducted by varying the parameters, e.g. pressure of air and water, distance between plate and nozzle tip and speed of plate as per Taguchi design of experiments. The results revealed that SIC has great advantage over the JIC method under the same thermal conditions. There was a fall of cooling rate with increase in plate thickness for both SIC and JIC. The requirement of shorter length of run-out table (ROT) in case of SIC has established the cost effectiveness of using SIC compared to JIC. The cooling process played a critical role in steel manufacturing industry where the determined cooling rates evaluated the setup costs during planning phase of the project.