Modeling of the Steel Flow and Non-Metallic Inclusion Separation due to Flotation in a Six-Strand cc Tundish

Constantly increasing customers’ demands for the production of high and very high-quality steels, promote the intensive technological development of their production. Today, the dominating method of global steel production is continuous casting. A continuous casting plant includes the ladle turret, several steel ladles, a tundish, and a mold followed by a framework of rolls to support the strip. The tundish has become a very important metallurgical unit in the continuous casting process. Nowadays its role is not only to guaranty the link between the process of secondary metallurgy and the continuous casting process in the mould but it becomes an active metallurgical reactor. Therefore in recent years a lot of researches were done to establish a better understanding of the physical phenomena accompanying the steel flow through the tundish and non-metallic inclusion separation into the top slag cover. The article presents computational studies of the three-dimensional turbulent steel flow and non-metallic inclusions separation in a multi-strand tundish for steady-state casting conditions. Simulations of the steel flow in the tundish are performed with boundary conditions that are derived from the real casting process. The mathematical model used for simulations, was partly validated with experimental measurements. Numerical calculations are carried out by the finite-volume code Fluent using k-ε standard turbulence model. With the calculated flow field, micro-inclusions removal due to flotation to the coving slag is investigated numerically. For the particle separation at the interface a modified boundary condition is implemented.