Investigation of water distribution, heat transfer and pocket water formation due to air/mist cooling in continuous casting of steel

Due to the rising demands for resource saving and sustainability, simulation tools are becoming increasingly important. These systems enable the realistic simulation of the continuous casting process, the performance of detailed analyses, and the investigation of various process variants in feasibility studies. In order to achieve this goal, the Chair of Ferrous Metallurgy of the Technical University of Leoben developed the non-commercial simulation software m²CAST. To describe the complex processes of heat removal in continuous casting, especially in the secondary cooling zone, boundary conditions are used to describe the thermal behavior of the system. To ensure high-quality input data for these boundary conditions, the Chair of Ferrous Metallurgy has constructed a nozzle measuring stand (NMS), allowing the measurement of water distributions (WD) and heat transfer coefficients (HTC). This data is used to analyze the spray behavior and cooling capacity of different industrial nozzles under various operating parameters. For this work, 85 WDs and 1785 HTCs for different nozzle types and operating parameters were measured. The determined WD were then compared and analyzed in terms of their influence on the HTC. The resulting data will furthermore be used to expand the m²CAST database and improve the heat transfer boundary condition of the spray water zone. Further, a testing rig was implemented in the NMS, expanding its capabilities and allowing the measurement of excess flow water, which is collected in the pocket between the strand surface and rolls. A total of 64 pocket water measurements were performed to analyze the behavior of the draining water between the strand and the roll. The dependency of the pool height on parameters such as water flow rate, air pressure and angle was investigated.