Innovative Low Melting Liquid Metal Model for Optimizing Argon Injection Practices during Steelmaking and Continuous Casting for Productivity and Quality Improvements

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Steelmakers are under constant pressure to increase productivity, and simultaneously maintain high quality of continuously cast steel slabs because of stringent quality demands imposed by their customers. However, increasing productivity has detrimental effects on slab quality, and defects and rejections have a major impact on the producers bottom-line. Controlling fluid flows in continuous casting is one of the key parameters to ensure cleaner steel and reduce defects. Physical and mathematical modeling is an essential tool to understand and optimize fluid flows in continuous casting. However, understanding bubbly and multiphase flows is not an easy task and traditional techniques like water modeling have certain limitations. The use of water models is reasonable and allows for applying a number of well-established measuring methods. However, a generalization of those results to liquid steel flows has to be considered carefully as the true values of flow parameters (Re, Pr, Gr, Ha, etc.) are difficult to meet. In many cases, e.g. for liquid metal flows with strong temperature gradients, for two-phase flows, and of course for applications of electromagnetic fields, the flow phenomena cannot be modeled correctly by means of water experiments. However, on using low melting point metals like (GaInSn alloys, Rose Metal, Field Metal etc.) these parameters are closer to the real steel/Ar system and hence the bubble dynamics and multiphase flow patterns are expected to be more realistic than water modeling. This project will deal with generating fundamental knowledge in the area of bubbly and multiphase flows in steelmaking continuous casting, and its application to improve product quality for AMDs flat products. This research program will utilize physical modeling approach to optimize argon injection during continuous casting and ladle stirring operations. At the caster, the project outcomes are expected to enable the increase of maximum casting speed of drawn & ironed (D&I) and ultra-low carbon (ULC) steel grades. The cost saving arising from improving both liquid and solid steel quality is expected to exceed $10 million/year.