Process development of thin strip steel casting. Final report.

摘要

An important new frontier is being opened in steel processing with the emergence of thin strip casting. Casting steel directly to thin strip has enormous benefits in energy savings by potentially eliminating the need for hot reduction in a hot strip mill. This has been the driving force for numerous current research efforts into the direct strip casting of steel. The US Department of Energy initiated a program to evaluate the development of thin strip casting in the steel industry. In earlier phases of this program, planar flow casting on an experimental caster was studied by a team of engineers from Westinghouse Electric corporation and Armco Inc. A subsequent research program was designed as a fundamental and developmental study of both planar and melt overflow casting processes. This study was arranged as several separate and distinct tasks which were often completed by different teams of researchers. An early task was to design and build a water model to study fluid flow through different designs of planar flow casting nozzles. Another important task was mathematically modeling of melt overflow casting process. A mathematical solidification model for the formation of the strip in the melt overflow process was written. A study of the material and conditioning of casting substrates was made on the small wheel caster using the melt overflow casting process. This report discusses work on the development of thin steel casting.