MATHEMATICAL-MODEL FOR PREDICTING SOLIDIFICATION AND COOLING OF STEELINSIDE MOLDS AND IN AIR

A two-dimensional mathematical model is presented to describe the soli dification and cooling of liquid steel. The liquid steel is poured int o a mold to obtain a solid mass of desired shape called an ingot. Afte r cooling of the steel in the mold for some time, the mold is removed. Then the leftover ingot mass is cooled in air. This article is concer ned with the above process. Nevertheless, the technique can be very ap plicable to other processes such as continuous casting. Partial differ ential equations describing the process have been discretized using co ntrol-volume (or (finite-volume) technique. The discretization equatio ns obtained are of tridiagonal matrix form, which have been solved usi ng the well-known tridiagonal matrix algorithm (TDMA) and the alternat e direction implicit (ADI) solver The model has been validated by meas uring surface temperatures of molds and ingots using an infrared therm o-vision scanner. This is then used to compute temperature distributio n and solidification status of the ingot as a function of time and typ e of ingot.