DRY COOLING SIMULATION OF CONTINUOUS CASTING OF AUSTENITIC STEEL SLABS

Increasing demands on the surface quality of steel slabs together with demands on reduction of water consumption lead to the idea of replacing the secondary cooling zone with water or water-air nozzles by the so-called dry cooling through the supporting rollers. The paper presents the computational study into the dry cooling with the use of the solidification model for continuous steel casting. The simulation is performed for the typical austenitic steel grade S30400. At the moment, the importance of stainless steels grades is increasing again, especially in the automotive industry in design of new types of car bodies as well as in the energetic industry, particularly in case of ultra-critical Rankine cycle. In the paper, a comparison is made for the two cases: a caster with the ordinary secondary cooling zone accommodating water-air nozzles in 13 loops of the secondary cooling zone, and a caster with the dry cooling. In both cases, the radial slab caster casting austenitic steel slabs with the dimensions 1500 mm x 150 mm is considered.