No abstract

In steel rolling mills, reheat furnaces are used to reheat slabs to high temperatures in a highly oxidizing environment; this results in the formation of iron oxide scale on the slab surface. Scale formation poses an ongoing material and economic loss to industry and should be minimized where feasible. The kinetics of scale growth are complex and still not fully understood. Previous studies that modeled scale formation with mathematical methods are limited to simple case studies. Here, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to simulate slab reheat furnace operations and to investigate complicated physical phenomenon. This paper proposes a new numerical method to model scale growth under varying conditions/characteristics including temperature, gas atmosphere composition, and steel grade. This method uses a mixed linear‐parabolic equation to model both the initial surface reaction (and scale formation) and the subsequent solid‐state ion diffusion through the developed scale. This model can be used to predict the amount of scale that will form on a slab under certain conditions. Model predictions were found to be consistent with experimental data.

No abstract

During the steelmaking and hot rolling processes, various defects and cracks appear throughout the steel product. These cracks may initiate and grow throughout the hot rolling process and result in a lower quality of the product than is acceptable. The most energy-intensive part of the hot rolling process is the reheating furnace, where slabs are heated up to a target rolling temperature largely through radiant heat transfer. In the reheat furnace, large stresses may develop due to the thermal gradients within the steel product. A thermal-stress analysis is proposed based on finite element method (FEM) to study the impacts of charging temperature, slab velocity, and heating rate on stress development as the steel slab travels through an industrial pusher-type reheat furnace. Furnace zone information is taken from a previously validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model and applied as thermal boundaries and constraints within the thermal-stress FEM models. Temperature and stress results were taken at the core, top, bottom, top quarter, and the bottom quarter of the steel slab at different residence times. Moreover, temperature lines and contour plots taken along the length of the slab allow visualization of the gradual development of temperature and identification of the locations corresponding to temperature variations as the slabs move in the furnace. The slab temperature predicted by the FEM model was found valid when compared with industrial data. Stress predictions found similar trends with previously published works as well as evidence of thermal shock in the sub-surface near the beginning of the residence time.