An improved design of tundish which has chambers for the plasma heating of liquid steel has been developed and tested. The design of the tundish improves heat and mass transfer processes inside it. The new design elements of the tundish accelerate the entry of the metal into zone occupied by the hightemperature plasma in order to improve the conditions for its heating and making the metal's temperature uniform throughout the volume of the tundish. Two tundishes of the new design were made and the plasma heating unit was factory-tested during the casting of steel on continuous caster No. 4 in the oxygen converter shop at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine. Keywords: continuous casting of steel, tundish, chamber for plasma heating of metal, intake compartment, teeming compartment, transfer channels, deflector, distribution of steel temperature in the heating chamber, mixing of the steel.The changes which have been to the technologies used for the continuous casting of steel have also changed the role of the tundish in this process as a device that distributes molten steel to the molds of the caster. A range of techniques is used to improve the quality of the resulting cast steel. The experience accumulated thus far shows that use of the simplest design of tundish can no longer satisfy the increasingly demanding requirements on the quality of continuous-cast semifinished products. The tundish should be designed so as to protect the molten steel from such sources of contamination as erosion of the refractories, repeat oxidation, and reaction with the ladle slag. At the same time, the tundish design should also provide for the coagulation, surfacing, and removal of nonmetallic inclusions through proper organization of the steel's movement and the elimination stagnation zones and truncated flow paths. Finally, the tundish should be designed so as to allow the use of complementary techniques such as inert-gas injection, the use of special covers and covering fluxes, the installation of sills and filters, control of the temperature of the steel, and the steel's deoxidation and microalloying [1-9]. On modern continuous casters, the steel is poured into the tundish through a protective tube injected with inert gas. To decrease the amount of interaction between the metal and air and to provide the tundish with thermal insulation, it is equipped with a cover and fluxes are added to the surface of the melt. The fluxes form slags of moderate basicity that can absorb deoxidation products and effectively prevent saturation of the steel by gases. It is recommended that the lining of the tundish be made of refractories having high contents of CaO, MgO, Al 2 O 3 , and ZrO 2 . The following measures help actively remove NIs from the steel: proper selection of the angle of inclination of the walls of the tundish and the positions of the partitions in the tundish; injection

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract