A meshless thermomechanical travelling-slice model of continuous casting of steel

Abstract

The travelling slice approximation of continuous casting process is widely used in industrial practice to model the heat transfer and solidification. Short computational times that are possible due to the reduction from three to two dimensions compensate for lower accuracy introduced by the approximation. In the same spirit, the travelling slice approximation is also used for the thermomechanical model in the present paper. The model includes contributions from metallostatic pressure, thermal contraction and viscoplastic deformation to describe the stress in the material slice. It incorporates simple models to predict the hot tearing and cracking. The model is solved with a novel strong-form meshless method. It allows flexible adaptive node distribution to accurately describe the behaviour in the solidifying region. In this paper we focus on the two-way coupling of the heat transfer and deformation of the strand to model the air-gap formation in the initial stage of the casting process and to study the emergent behaviour that is the result of this coupling. We find that the inclusion of the air-gap model significantly changes the stress distribution in the corners of the strand because of the reheating caused by the reduced heat-transfer.

A new hybrid local radial basis function collocation method for 2.5D thermo-mechanical modelling of continuous casting of steel

“…Many complicated multi-physics and multi-scale phenomena have been studied [1] recently. Compared to the full 3D models, the travelling slice models are much more computationally efficient and can reasonably well describe the thermo-mechanical phenomena of the strands [2]. A 2D mechanical slice model can be extended by assuming a generalised plane strain where linear strains are introduced in the direction perpendicular to the slice.…”

A meshless numerical solution of thermo-mechanics of hot-rolled steel bars on a cooling bed

“…The meshless strong form radial basis function generated finite difference (RBF-FD) method has gained popularity in modelling different steel production processes. It has been successfully applied to solve large spectra of continuous casting problems, such as diffusion-convection with phase change [1], natural convection influenced by magnetic stirring [3], turbulence phenomena [4], 2D microsegregation with grain growth [5], and 2D thermo-mechanics [6]. Also, multi-pass hot-rolling has been successfully modelled with RBF-FD [2,7], including the grain size prediction [8].…”

Nonlinear elastic-plastic analysis of reinforced concrete column-steel beam connection by RBF-FD method

“…Currently, various types of numerical approaches with RBFs have been developed for different engineering problems [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. The RBF-FD method is one of most famous numerical methods [6,[13][14][15][16] with only need a few nodes to form a sparse matrix, which enhance the computational speed significantly. However, its derivatives cause instability [17][18][19].…”