NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF FLOW BEHAVIOUR AND WALL SHEAR STRESS IN CONTINUOUS CASTING TUNDISH

Abstract

Continuous casting process has nowadays used for 95% of world’s steel production. Experimental analysis of continuous casting was tedious due to having many complex phenomena and high temperature so we analyze this process with the help of many computational models like fluid flow model, heat transfer model, solidification model etc. Due to flow inside the tundish, shear stress was developed on the walls and Standard k- 𝜀 turbulence model used for wall shear stress analysis. Initially simple boat shape tundish with change in outlet positions with velocity were simulated and contours of wall shear stress of tundish were plotted. Bottom wall of tundish has maximum wall shear stress for respective geometry at given velocity. While front wall which was near to outlets along + z direction has more wall shear than back wall in all the cases of outlets positions, which was opposite to front wall except the symmetric geometry case of outlet positions. Effect of inclinations in simple boat shape walls on fluid flow and wall shear stress were analyzed. The results obtained by changing the wall inclinations were also compared with T shape tundish. After that effect of shroud depth was studied on boat shape and T shape tundish. Shroud inclination effect on wall shear were also analyzed on boat shape and T shape tundish. Wall shear stress and velocity contours were plotted for all the different possible cases discussed above and results were compared with each other. It was observed that simple boat shape case has more wall shear stress on bottom and back wall, while T shape has maximum wall shear on front wall and minimum on back wall. Bottom wall shear decreases with shroud depth but back wall stress first increases then decreases for boat shapes but continue to decrease for T shape.