Analysis of Solidification and Thermal-Mechanical Behaviors in Continuous Casting

Continuous casting (CC) is the most utilized steel making process today, but knowledge on the many complex phenomena that occur within the process could be gained. Issues such as transient flow patterns and immoderate amounts of localized stress can result in internal or external defects such as surface cracks. With the advancement in computational power, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can provide significant insights into solidification and solid stress within CC. This work will focus on solidification of the shell within the mold, and the stresses that occur within the solidified shell. Excessive stress on a thinning portion of the shell is one of the main catalysts in the case of a breakout so it is important to understand its behavior and overall impact. Solidification and thermal-mechanical models were developed using the commercial CFD and FEM software STAR-CCM+™. The main objective of this paper is to create a simplistic method for analyzing stress in a solidifying shell that takes into account temperature distribution from the melt.