THERMAL MODELING AND STRESS-ANALYSIS IN THE CONTINUOUS-CASTING OF ARBITRARY SECTIONS

A three-dimensional parabolic heat conduction model has been developed to analyze heat transfer and solidification in variously shaped continuous casters. A fixed grid source based enthalpy method was used to model solidification during a casting process. In order to correctly model arbitrary cross-sectional shaped castings, a body-fitted coordinate transformation (BFT) technique was employed to transform the physical space on to a rectangular computational domain. The transformed governing equations and boundary conditions were solved in the transformed plane. Two arbitrarily shaped casters, having dog-bone, and hexagonal cross-sections, were tested in this study. The governing equations were discretized using the control-volume finite difference approach, wherein an implicit solution technique was employed to solve the set of discretized algebraic equations. From the temperature field predicted by heat flow model, a quasi-non-linear stress analysis was carried out within the solidifying shell of the beam blank (dog bone) section. The effect of roller arrangement on the distortion of solidified shell was investigated.