In the metals industries, electric energy has been used as heat energy for an extended period of time for reasons of cleanliness, high controllability and high energy density. Technologies using electric energy were developed in a rather early era and went forward without much scientific understanding behind them. Good examples are electromagnetic levitation and electromagnetic stirring, which were invented in 1923 and 1932, respectively. To bridge the gap between the technologies and the scientific understanding, magnetohydrodynamics - established by Alfven in 1942 - was first introduced at the 1982 IUTAM Conference, held in Cambridge, England, in a paper entitled, "The Application of Magnetohydrodynamics to Metallurgy." The conference introduced many people to the field of electromagnetic processing of materials (EPM), though the term EPM was initially used at the first Symposium of EPM held in Nagoya, Japan, in 1994. Until now, EPM activities have focused mainly on the economic aspects relating to mass production and the nanotechnology relating to high-quality materials. Now EPM involves not only the Lorentz force, but also the magnetization force related to a high magnetic field. In this paper, continuous casting without mold oscillation is introduced as a recent topic in the steel-making field. In addition, the application of a high magnetic field in EPM is classified, and three topics are discussed in detail: (1) magnetic valve of a molten metal flow, (2) quantitative evaluation of phase transformation and (3) crystal orientation in metal solidification.
展开▼
