Scale-Model Experiment and Numerical Simulation of a Steel Teeming Process

Abstract

During the teeming process of molten steel from a ladle, a bathtub-type vortex may be formed. The vortex entrains undesired slag floating on the surface, lowering the quality. The formation of such vortices was studied using scale models. Since the kinematic viscosity of water is similar to that of molten steel, we used water in our experiments. The particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique was used to measure water flow patterns. Dimensional analysis showed that the Froude number was the governing Π number. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model successfully simulated the behavior of the vortex formed in our scale-model experiments.

Keywords:

• Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• Dimensional analysis
• Froude number
• Particle image velocimetry (PIV)
• Pi number
• Quality control
• Reynolds number
• Scale-model experiment
• Scaling law
• Slag entrainment
• Steel teeming process
• Tangential velocity
• Volume of fluid (VOF)
• Vortex formation
• Weber number

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was supported by Nippon Steel Corporation, Japan. We thank K. Sekimoto for valuable discussions on scaling laws.