Hydrodynamic conditions of flow in the tundish depending on selected technological parameters for different steel groups

The presented results of investigations are part of a larger study focused on the optimization of the flow and mixing of liquid steel in the industrial tundish of continuous casting machine. The numerical simulations were carried out concern the analysis of hydrodynamic conditions of liquid steel flow in a tundish operating in one of the national steelworks. Numerical simulations were performed using the commercial code ANSYS Fluent. The research concerns two different speeds of steel casting. In real conditions, these speeds are the most commonly used in the technological process when casting two different groups of steel. As a result of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations, predicted spatial distributions of velocity and liquid steel turbulence fields and residence time distribution (RTD) curves were obtained. The volume fractions of different flows occurring in the tundish were also calculated. The results of the research allowed a detailed analysis of the influence of casting speed on the formation of hydrodynamic conditions prevailing in the reactor.