Simulation of electromagnetic field and its effect during electromagnetic stirring in continuous casting mold

Abstract

A mathematical model of in-mold electromagnetic stirrer has been developed to calculate the three-dimensional time-varying magnetic field for electromagnetic stirring in the continuous casting mold. The calculated magnetic field is coupled with the magneto-hydrodynamic and solidification model to analyze the effect of stirrer width at different current and frequency applied to the stirrer. The enthalpy porosity technique is used to track the liquid-solid transformation while the realizable k-ε turbulence model is used to account the turbulence in the fluid flow. The coupling of the time-varying electromagnetic field with solidification model makes the model complicate which leads to having divergence problem and large computation time. The model efficiently computes the electromagnetic field, fluid flow, solidification behavior of an electromagnetically stirred continuous casting mold, which have been validated against the reported results. From the initial results it is observed that magnetic flux density significantly increases with increase in stirrer width and current while, frequency has a marginal effect on magnetic flux density. The result obtained from coupled model shows that increase in frequency has a large influence on stirring intensity and hence on solidification behavior. However, stirrer width and current marginally affect the stirring intensity and solidification behavior.