Importance of the experimental investigation of a concasting technology

The solidification and cooling of a continuously cast billet, slab or cylinder, generally of a concasting and the simultaneous heating of the mold is a very complicated problem of three-dimensional (3D) transient heat and mass transfer. The solving of such a problem is impossible without numerical models of the temperature field of the concasting itself which it is being processed through the concasting machine (caster). The application of the numerical model requires systematic experimentation and measurement of operational parameters on a real caster as well as in the laboratory. The measurement results, especially temperatures, serve not only for the verification of the exactness of the model, but mainly for optímization of the process procedure: real process → input data → numerical analyses → optimization → correction of real process. The most important part of the investigation is the measurement of the temperatures in the walls of the mold and the surface of the slab in the zones of secondary and tertiary cooling.