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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 CFD simulations and subsequent plant trials of the most promising designs. A 3D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach using the realizable k-ε 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 of 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 allows minimizing the steel short-circuiting from the in-gate region to the tundish trough while ensuring a stable, uniform flow with lesser turbulence towards the bath surface. Further effect was to achieve a slow plug-flow underneath the bath surface reaching up to the tundish ends, leading to low turbulence levels and increased steel residence times thereby providing enhanced conditions for the removal of non-metallic inclusions. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by means of metallurgical results on inclusion characterization from plant trials.
Keywords: Clean steel, Tundish flow, Numerical 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.