Physical and Mathematical Modeling of Thin Steel Slab Continuous Casting Secondary Cooling Zone Air-Mist Impingement

This study is an attempt to unveil the fluid dynamic phenomena occurring during interaction of air-mists with the surface of the steel strand during its pass through the continuous casting secondary cooling system. Air-mists generated under conditions of practical interest are studied while impacting on a vertical wall at room temperature. Experimentally a spatial multiple-counting technique based on capturing instantaneous double-exposure shadowgraphs is used to visualize the internal structure of mists at distances between 0 and 4 mm from the wall. Analysis of single exposure images allows determination of size distributions of primary (impinging) and secondary (ejecting) drops and of fluctuating thickness of water films formed on the wall surface. Besides, examination of image pairs enables measurement of velocity and trajectory angles of both kinds of drops. These results aided in the formulation and validation of a transient, turbulent, 3D, multiphase fluid dynamic model for simulating impinging air-mists. The model is based on KIVA-3V and for simulating the airborne mist region it solves the continuity equations—mass, momentum, turbulence quantities—for the air coupled with the equation of motion for drops sampled randomly from distributions assumed to govern their size and volume flux at the nozzle orifice. While for the impingement region submodels are established to estimate the results of drop/wall interaction, i.e., the dynamics of secondary drops and water films formed by the impingement of primary drops. The model forecasts reasonably well the random distributions of diameters, velocities, trajectory angles, and Weber numbers of both kind of drops moving near the wall. Additionally, it predicts well the average thickness of the water film and the important effect that air nozzle pressure has on the normal impinging velocity of drops; high pressures result in large drop velocities favoring intimate contact with the surface.