“…In fact, several authors (Matsumiya et al, 1986;Miyazaki et al, 1981;Nagata et al, 1990;Won et al, 2000;Yamanaka et al, 1995) relate the risk of hot-tearing to the magnitude of these variables. Then, strains (Figure 4) and strain rates ( Figure 5) are calculated for the cases (a), (b), (c) and (d) for a circular cross-section with a diameter of 300 mm and a casting speed of 1 m min -1 , using an in-house finite-elements 3D Eulerian model (Dvorkin and Toscano, 2003) with constant viscosity. The boundary conditions fix the bar location at the straightening points but allow it to take any position between them.…”