The effect of tundish wall inclination on the fluid flow and mixing: A modeling study
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I.
INTRODUCTION
CONTINUOUS casting of steel has become a widely-used process and an important step in the manufacture of steel. The past couple of decades have seen a remarkable increase in the share of continuously cast steel. Concurrent with this increase in production levels are the stringent quality requirements. These quality aspects have become crucial with progressively increasing machine throughputs and larger product dimensions. As a result, steel cleanliness and strict composition control are now becoming the primary concern of steelmakers. It is now well known that fluid flow through the tundish influences the slab cast quality. Generally, the time available for the separation ofnonmetallics in the tundish is very short. The inclusion flotation and hence their removal can be maximized if the melt flow can be so modified as to result in having minimum stagnant volume conditions and optimum circulation in the tundish. Attempting to find better control on inclusion removal, many workers 1-1~have studied fluid flow in tundishes using their aqueous analogs. Flow visualization with dye or other tracers and residence time distribution studies have provided very useful results. Nevertheless, a detailed knowledge of flow field and turbulence in a tundish system is a prerequisite before the tundish design could be optimized. Very little information is available on the detailed fluid flow in tundishes. Only recently some attempts H'~2'~3have been made to study the tundish hydrodynamics. The purpose of this work has been to develop a three-dimensional mathematical model to represent the tundish hydrodynamics. Fluid flow parameters and residence time distribution have been predicted in a tundish of rectangular cross section. The model is later extended to predict fluid flow in typical industrial tundishes where walls are not vertical, but rather slightly inclined from the vertical. Wall inclination has normally been ignored in physical and mathematical modeling for the sake of convenience and in anticipation that such a small inclination would not make much difference in the flow. The predicted results with inclined walls show an
YOUDUO HE (on leave from Boutao Institute of Iron and Steel Technology, People's Republic of China), Research Associate, and YOGESHWARSAHAI, Associate Professor, are with the Department of MetallurgicalEngineering,The Ohio State University,116 West 19th Avenue, Columbus,OH 43210. ManuscriptsubmittedOctober4, 1985. METALLURGICALTRANSACTIONSB
interesting variation in the fluid flow, which may have important technological implications. The predicted results have been verified by a small-scale water model. Finally, the flow field and mixing in full-scale tundishes with steel as melt have been predicted.
II.
EXPERIMENTAL
Two plexiglas models reduced to one-third scale of typical slab caster tundishes were made. One was a rectangular cross-sectioned channel, while the other had its walls outwardly inclined by 4 deg from the vertical to represent industrially used tundishes. In this study, t
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