A vertical continuous casting machine for large blooms

ABSTRACT

The Zhong Yuan Special Steel Company installed a vertical continuous casting machine to achieve higher productivity and product yield while retaining world-leading product quality. The vertical continuous casting machine was commissioned by Voestalpine Stahl in 2015. Zhong Yuan Special Steel required a special design for quality and size, comprising a special tundish, mould, secondary cooling system, and vertical roll layout. Other advanced technology packages included stopper rod controls, hydraulic oscillator, online solidification model, and online breakout prevention system. The new machine not only improved casting billet quality, but also improved production efficiency and reduced costs compared with tradition ingot casting. The tundish and electromagnetic mixing were optimised by extensive computational fluid dynamics simulations. The tundish design was optimised by physical water model experiments.

KEYWORDS:

• Vertical continuous casting machine
• large round bloom
• special steel
• tundish design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51504130,51474125), Major science and technology projects of He'nan Province, China (151100212700). Partial support was also provided by Foundation of Liaoning Educational Committee (2016HZPY05) and Special Fund of USTL (2017HZ01).