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The European steel industry is facing transformational changes that will affect metallurgical quality, including steel cleanliness. In the face of this, digital simulation and virtual engineering methods are being increasingly employed in the steel industry to test and optimize process and equipment designs quickly and accurately. The present work deals with design optimization to improve the steel flow conditions in a 6-strand tundish of a billet caster for enhanced cleanliness through virtual prototyping using Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations and subsequent plant trials of the most promising designs. A 3D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes approach using the realizable k- model of turbulence together with a two-phase model of steel-argon flows was employed to simulate the tundish flow and to propose design modifications. Several virtual prototypes with additional flow modifiers were evaluated to predict performance and optimize the design configurations. A pair of appropriately sized extra flow diversion elements, placed at 100 mm from the weirs on either side of the tundish center, was found to give the best results. This configuration minimizes steel short-circuiting from the in-gate region into the tundish trough, reduces turbulence near the bath surface, and promotes slow plug-like flow towards the tundish ends, thereby improving the conditions for the removal of non-metallic inclusions. The effectiveness of the optimized design was confirmed by inclusion-characterization results obtained from plant trials.
Keywords: Tundish flow, clean steel, continuous casting, simulation© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.