To guarantee the quality of continuously cast steel, the solidifying process should be studied. Both theory and experiments have shown that excessive stress inside the steel strand, which results from thermal contraction, bending and bulging of the solidified shell, can cause internal and surface cracks. The bulging of the shell is in general a visco-elasto-plastic phenomenon coupled with phase change. In this paper, the theory of elasticity is applied to study numerically the bulging behavior of the solid shell between consecutive supporting rollers. The boundary conditions between the shell and the rollers are described by the physical elastic contact theory. By an adjusting algorithm, the boundary conditions can be established. Considering the geometry of the steel slab, both heat transfer and stress analysis can be simplified to two-dimensional problems. Furthermore, the heat transfer process can be treated independently of the deformation. With these simplifications, numerical results are obtained.
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