Development of a Mold Cracking Simulator: The Study of Breakout and Crack Formation in Continuous Casting Mold

Based on the mold simulator technology, a mold-cracking simulator has been successfully developed to study the process of breakout and the shell surface crack formation during the initial solidification of molten steel inside the continuous casting mold. First, a spheroidal protrusion was installed on the mold hot surface to mimic the abnormal force that generated by mold wall deformation, and then the external force was applied to the initial solidified shell, to facilitate the formation of breakout and shell surface cracks. Second, the responding temperature and heat flux across mold hot surface were recovered by an inverse heat conduction problem. The experimental results indicated that the mold breakout occurs around the shell tip by the combined efforts from external horizontal force, ferrostatic pressure, and thermal stresses during positive strip time. The breakout tends to introduce the peak of the responding temperature and heat flux across the mold hot surface. The vertical propagation velocity of the rupture point in the solidification shell has been calculated as 0.42 m/s in this study, which is in good agreement with industrial slabs. The paper also suggested that surface transverse crack formation is related to the segregation of sulfur during the initial solidification of molten steel.