Liquid Metal Modelling Of The Continuous Casting Process

The steel quality in continuous casting is greatly affected by the flow in the mould. Therefore, big efforts are made to adjust and control the flow in the mould. The tools for flow control are mainly the plant design and the use of contactless and flexible electromagnetic fields. Those electromagnetic actuators are already in use for decades in industry. Furthermore, for steel quality reasons argon can be added in the submerged entry nozzle to prevent nozzle clogging and to remove inclusions. But for both issues – electromagnetic fields and two-phase flow - an actual and detailed understanding about their action on the flow remained unclear due to inappropriate measuring techniques for liquid steel and the inadequate portability of water models for these special cases.
To get an insight into the effects of electromagnetic fields and argon bubbles on the mould flow, three experimental facilities were built up, operating with low melting liquid metals. The advantage of using these low melting metals is the availability of appropriate measurement techniques. First results already showed a strong influence of a static magnetic field on the spatial and temporal flow structure, where the conductivity of the walls plays an important role. Experiments with Argon injection revealed a complex flow and a complicated bubble creation mechanism. All the measurements provide valuable data for the validation of numerical models, which aimed to reproduce the continuous casting process of steel. The numerical models validated at model experiments can than simulate real casting machines more accurate. This paper will present the three experimental setups operating with liquid metals as model fluid and some measurement results. The three setups have slightly different scopes of investigation.