COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF A TRAILBLAZER MULTI REACTOR TUNDISH (MRT) FOR IMPROVING YIELD AND QUALITY OF STEEL DURING CONTINUOUS CASTING

Debasish Chatterjee

Abstract: Increasing the production efficiency of the continuous casting process requires casting longer sequences of ladles without stopping and restarting the caster. As the demand for wider ranges of steel products increases at the same time, the intermixing of dissimilar grades is becoming a problem of growing concern. When high grade dissimilar grade steel intermixed, huge amount of metal is lost from down gradation. With increased usage of steel for critical applications, the demand for cleaner steel has increased. Existing technologies have been improved and new technologies are being introduced all along the process route to minimize the size and quantity of inclusions. The bad effect of inclusion is it creates sliver in the hot rolled coil. To overcome the aforementioned problems a novel multi reactor tundish (MRT) technology has been developed which will decrease the intermixed amount during grade transition. Simultaneously it will increase the quality of steel by removing inclusion by increasing the plug flow and residence time in tundish. A computational study of the newly developed tundish has been done by using Fluent 6.3 computational fluid dynamics software and the results has been compared with two different type of normal tundish used in industry.

Keywords: Tundish, Grade Transition, Inclusion, Yield

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0209054