New Generation of Continuous Casting Plants with Intelligent Manufacturing Strategy

Abstract

The changing market situations demand a sustainable usage of new and available technologies to support steel producers with highly flexible plant configurations and tools. Therefore, investments are focused on an optimization of production costs and product quality with a short-term return. The modular design of upgrade solutions provides an individual configuration of metallurgical process-optimization holistically taking into account the steel making and casting route. One of the important developments in the last years is the integration of process parameters over the entire production route, ranging from iron making to finishing processes. This was also considered for casting plants through the usage of the actual chemical steel analysis from secondary metallurgy as an input parameter-set for the process model at the casting plant by DynaPhase phase transformation modelling. Consequently, the casting process is controlled more predictably and with high accuracy, such as the exact determination of the final point of solidification for a state of the art soft reduction. Furthermore, a reduction of energy costs while improving the product quality was the focus of the new developments, which resulted for example in the completely new secondary cooling system DynaJet Flex. This system does not need any operation air and increases the cooling turn down rate two fold, which accommodates the growing demands in special steel casting. Apart from the topics mentioned above, this paper gives an overview of the new developments in continuous casting of the last two years with several results out of operation and highlights the Industrie 4.0 setup of continuous caster process modelling with plant configuration.