Modeling the Entrapment of Nonmetallic Inclusions in Steel Continuous-Casting Billets

Understanding the entrapment of inclusions in the solidifying shell within a steel continuous-casting strand is important to predict and improve the internal quality of the steel product. The current work presents two approaches to predict the particle entrapment in the full length of a billet caster. First, the sink term approach assumed a cone-shaped solidification shell and ignored the heat transfer and solidification, and sink terms were added to the equations to represent the mass loss and momentum loss during solidification. The inclusions were entrapped once they touched the shell. Second, full solidification considered the effect of turbulent flow, heat transfer, solidification, and the motion of inclusions. Inclusions were entrapped once they moved to the location with a liquid fraction of 0.6. The calculated inclusion distribution in the billet by the full solidification approach agreed with the industrial measurement better than the sink term approach. For future study, the effects of the inclusion size and the first arm spacing on the entrapment of inclusions will be included in the full solidification approach.