Recent developments on contactless inductive flow tomography for continuous casting

In continuous casting the flow of the liquid steel in the mold has great impact on the quality of the produced steel. During casting even a rough knowledge of the flow field would be highly desirable in order to control process parameters or electromagnetic actuators. The high temperature of the liquid steel recommends a contactless measurement technique.
The contactless inductive flow tomography (CIFT) is able to reconstruct the dominating two-dimensional flow structure in a slab casting mold by measuring the perturbation of an applied magnetic field outside the mold and solving a linear inverse problem. In this paper we will give an overview of the application of CIFT to two models of continuous casting available at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden – Rossendorf. For a physical model of a mold with a cross section of 140 mm × 35 mm we present the new measurement system using induction coils and show preliminary measurements of the flow field in the mold in the presence of a magnetic brake. In addition, we show first reconstructions of the flow field in a mold with the cross section of 400 mm × 100 mm demonstrating the upward scalability of CIFT. We will conclude with recent developments towards an implementation in industry.