Study of Solidification and Heat Transfer Behavior of Mold Flux Through Mold Flux Heat Transfer Simulator Technique: Part I. Development of the Technique

A Mold Flux Heat Transfer Simulator technique was developed to investigate the solidification and heat transfer behavior of mold flux in this study. The results suggested that the responding temperatures and heat fluxes increase intensively within the first second, due to the direct heating from the liquid core. It takes 1 second for the system to be heated up and to form the initial solidified mold flux shell, such that the heat fluxes and the liquid front temperature would start to reduce after that. After 2.5 seconds, the in-mold responding temperature and heat fluxes are getting attenuated with the development of the mold flux solidification and crystallization. After 15-20 seconds, the system steps into a quasi-steady state, as the cooling potential becomes identical to the heating potential due to the further development of total thermal resistance that is introduced by the further solidification and crystallization of mold flux. In addition, a mathematic model was built to calculate the interfacial thermal resistance (Rint) at the mold/flux interface, and the calculated interfacial thermal resistance was around 18.9 × 10−4 m2 K W−1, which accounts for about 78.4 pct of the total thermal resistance.