Effects of the asymmetric and oscillating turbulent melt flow on the heat transfer and solidification inside the thin slab continuous casting (TSC) mold under the applied electromagnetic brake (EMBr)

The thin slab casting (TSC) is a breakthrough near-net-shape technique for flat
products accompanied by rapid casting and solidification rates. The TSC quality hinges on the
turbulence, super-heat flow and growth of the solidified shell. The electromagnetic brake
(EMBr) is commonly applied to control the fresh melt flow after feeding through a submerged
entry nozzle (SEN). Numerical modelling is a perfect tool to investigate the multiphase
phenomena in the continuous casting (CC). The presented study considers the heat transfer
through the solid shell and water-cooled copper mold including the averaged thermal resistance
of the slag skin and the air gap coupled with the turbulent flow and magnetohydrodynamics
(MHD) model using an in-house code developed inside the open-source computational fluid
dynamics (CFD) package OpenFOAM®. The model is applied to investigate different undesired
asymmetric melt flow issues: (i) with the misaligned or (ii) partially blocked SEN; (iii) caused
by the mean flow fluctuations with the natural frequencies; (iv) related to the oscillations of the
fresh melt jets for the specific SEN designs and casting regimes. The variation of the flow pattern
and superheat distribution is studied and presented for different scenarios both with and without
applied EMBr.