Interfacial heat transfer is a key issue in many solidification processes. In the paper, a novel experimental apparatus has been designed and on this basis, the instantaneous interfacial heat transfer between molten steel or solidified shell and copper substrate during the first 0.2 s has been studied. The investigated parameters include melt superheat, substrate temperature and surface roughness. The results show that the peak value of the interfacial heat flux in the first stage of liquid/solid contact increases with melt superheat and changes slightly with substrate temperature and surface roughness. The interfacial heat flux in the stage of solid/solid contact has a similar trend of slow decrease in most conditions.It is self-evident that the interfacial heat transfer between molten metal and molds in the solidification processes is very important to casting. Most of the previous work [1][2][3] concentrated on the determination of interfacial heat transfer between casting and metal or sand molds in quite a long time, for example, from seconds to minutes. However, in many rapid or near rapid solidification processes, such as strip casting, the total solidification time is less than 0.5 s. Recently, studies on the interfacial heat transfer of initial solidification in fragments of second have been paid more attentions, but the materials most used in experiments are low melting point metals and alloys, such as aluminum alloy. For the high melting point alloys with high commercial value such as steel, studies on instantaneous interfacial heat transfer in solidification have not been intensively carried out.The solidification process of melt on metal substrate surface can be divided into two stages: liquid/solid contact and solid/solid (S/S) contact. In the first contact stage, a low interfacial thermal resistance and a high interfacial heat flux occur due to the better wettability condition between liquid and solid. In the S/S contact stage, the thermal resistance increases and the heat flux decreases owing to air gaps formed between the solidified shell and the substrate.Accurate determination of instantaneous interfacial heat transfer can not only expand our understanding on initial solidification, but also provide boundary conditions for numerical simulation. However, there are many difficulties in this problem. The high melt temperature results in no proper thermocouples which can be placed in the melt; the short solidification time requires quick response time of the temperature measurement parts; the high value and the great change of the heat flux result in a great temperature change in the substrate. It requires proper design of the substrate and the temperature measurement to insure good resolving power for the initial interfacial heat transfer.Various apparatuses and simulators have been developed to study this problem. In these experiments, the droplet solidification method was used most widely [4][5][6][7][8] . In a typical experimental process, a melt droplet was molten and dripped onto a metal subst...