Steady-State Heat Flux Prediction to Slabs in a Walking Beam Furnace

Abstract

After casting steel slabs are reheated in a reheat furnace to temperatures in the range 1200-1250 °C in order to be suitable for rolling. The high energy requirements and the importance of reheating for quality control are the motivation behind numerically modeling the furnace. Computational fluid dynamics allows us to understand the fundamental physics with great detail. It is however unclear how assumptions of such models influence the results of the simulations. In this work a steady-state model was analyzed, and it was found that the chosen slab temperature profile can underestimate the average heat flux on the slab surface by 30%. A slab model was employed to simulate the transient slab temperatures which results in an underestimation of the average slab temperatures by about 500 °C for the case with reduced fluxes. The uniform slab temperature assumption also results in the overestimation of heat fluxes on its front and side face.

Acknowledgements

The results of this paper are obtained within the framework of the Baekeland Mandate which is jointly funded by VLAIO Vlaams Agentschap Innoveren En Ondernemen (Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship) and ArcelorMittal, Belgium. The participation of Ghent University is also acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zaaquib Yunus Ahmed

Zaaquib Yunus Ahmed received his M.Sc. in computational mechanics from University of Stuttgart, Germany. He is currently a doctoral researcher in the research group Sustainable Thermo-Fluid Energy Systems of the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at Ghent University, Belgium. His research includes studying fluid flow behavior using computational fluid dynamics and is currently working on modeling combustion and heat transfer in reheat furnaces.

Ilya T’Jollyn

Ilya T’Jollyn received his M.Sc. degree in Electromechanical Engineering from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium in 2014. He is currently a teaching assistant and Ph.D. candidate in the research group Sustainable Thermo-Fluid Energy Systems of the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at Ghent University, Belgium. His research interests include heat transfer in electrical machines and systems, and he is currently working on two-phase power electronics cooling and innovative motor cooling techniques.

Steven Lecompte

Steven Lecompte is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Energy, Metals, Mechanical Construction and Systems, Ghent University, Belgium. He obtained his master and Ph.D. degrees in Electromechanical Engineering at Ghent University in 2012 and 2016, respectively. His research is on thermal machines, including thermo-economic optimization, multi-phase processes, expanders, and compressors. In 2016 and 2018 he was a visiting researcher at Imperial College London for in total 5 months doing research on multiphase flows. In 2017 he obtained a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). He is chair of the KCORC (Knowledge Center on Organic Rankine Cycle Technology) editorial board and of the ‘Koelplatform’. He is the author or coauthor of more than 60 scholarly articles or conference papers

Toon Demeester

Toon Demeester obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electromechanical Engineering at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2016 and 2020, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis was titled “Efficient quasi-Newton methods for steady free surface flow”. He is currently a postdoc in the Sustainable Thermo-Fluid Energy Systems research group of the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at Ghent University, with a research focus on numerical methods for flow and heat transfer.

Teun De Raad

Teun de Raad holds a M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Twente University in The Netherlands. He has 20 years’ experience working on the hot strip mill furnaces in ArcelorMittal Gent.

Michel De Paepe

Michel De Paepe is a Professor of Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer at the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the Ghent University. In 2002, he founded the research group Applied Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer. Research by this team, with about 15 Ph.D. students and 3 staff members, focuses on thermodynamics of new energy systems, performance of HVAC systems, and complex heat transfer phenomena in industrial applications, as in compact heat exchangers, combustion engines, refrigerant two-phase flow, and electronics cooling.