WATER MODEL STUDY ON CONVECTION PATTERN OF MOLTEN STEEL FLOW IN CONTINUOUS-CASTING TUNDISH

Natural convection will obviously influence the liquid steel flow in c ontinuous casting (CC) tundish, which cannot be neglected in tundish m etallurgical process. Through the theoretical analysis, the dimensionl ess number, Gr/Re-2, is adopted to determine the convection pattern in tundish system. Validity of this criteria in a reduced scale water mo del are also discussed in this paper. Non-isothermal water model exper iment with the temperature variation of inlet stream, has been simulat ed to see the effect of temperature variation of ladle stream. The con vection pattern of molten steel flow in continuous casting tundish is also studied numerically by using the commercialized computational flu id dynamic (CFD) software package, CFX4. From the results of theoretic al analysis, physical and mathematical model simulation, it can be sta ted that the convection pattern of molten steel flow in tundish is con trolled by the combined nature convection and forced convection.