Direct Chill (DC) casting of aluminium alloys is a widely established technology for efficient production of aluminium billets and slabs. The procedure is being further improved by the application of Low Frequency Electromagnetic Field (LFEM) in the area of the mold. Novel LFEM DC processing technique affects many different phenomena which occur during solidification, one of them being the stresses and deformations present in the billet. These quantities can have a significant effect on the quality of the cast piece, since they impact porosity, hot-tearing and cold cracking. In this contribution a novel local radial basis function collocation method (LRBFCM) is successfully applied to the problem of stress field calculation during the stationary state of DC casting of aluminium alloys. The formulation of the method is presented in detail, followed by the presentation of the tackled physical problem. The model describes the deformations of linearly elastic, inhomogeneous isotropic solid with a given temperature field. The temperature profile is calculated using the in-house developed heat and mass transfer model. The effects of low frequency EM casting process parameters on the vertical, circumferential and radial stress and on the deformation of billet surface are presented. The application of the LFEM appears to decrease the amplitudes of the tensile stress occurring in the billet.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3925243
Simulation and control of macrosegregation, deformation and grain size under electromagnetic (EM) processing conditions is important in industrial solidification systems, since it influences the quality of the casts and consequently the whole downstream processing path. Respectively, a multiphysics and multiscale model is developed for solution of Lorentz force, temperature, velocity, concentration, deformation and grain structure of the casts. The mixture equations with lever rule, linearized phase diagram, and stationary thermoelastic solid phase are assumed, together with EM induction equation for the field imposed by the low frequency EM field or Ohm’s law and charge conservation equation for stationary EM field. Turbulent effects are incorporated through the solution of a low-Re turbulence model. The solidification system is treated by the mixture-continuum model, where the mushy zone is modeled as a Darcy porous media with Kozeny-Karman permeability relation and columnar solid phase moving with the system velocity. Explicit diffuse approximate meshless solution procedure is used for solving the EM field, and the explicit local radial basis function collocation method is used for solving the coupled transport phenomena and thermomechanics fields. Pressure-velocity coupling is performed by the fractional step method. The point automata method with modified KGT model is used to estimate the grain structure in a post-processing mode. Thermal, mechanical, EM and grain structure outcomes of the model are demonstrated for low frequency EM casting of aluminium billets and continuous casting of steel. A systematic study of the complicated influences of the process parameters on the microstructure can be investigated by the model, including intensity and frequency of the electromagnetic field.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1136042
The application of magnetohydrodynamics in the continuous casting of steel enables improved control of the quality of the strand. The most common applications are electromagnetic braking (EMBR) and electromagnetic stirring (EMS). The former slows the flow by applying a static magnetic field and thus improves the steel flow pattern, reduces the velocity and the turbulence of the flow, increases the cleanliness of the material, improves the surface quality and reduces the number of inclusions, whereas the latter stirs the flow by applying an alternating magnetic field and thus improves the quality of the strand, reduces the surface and subsurface defects, enhances the solidification and reduces the number of breakouts. In this contribution EMBR in a continuous-casting process is considered. The local radial basis function collocation method (LRBFCM) is used for the solution of coupled mass, energy, turbulent fluid flow, species and magnetic field equations. The explicit Euler time-stepping scheme and the collocation with multiquadrics radial basis functions on the five-noded overlapping influence domains are used to obtain the solution of the partial differential equations. The Abe-Kondoh-Nagano low Reynolds turbulence model is used to describe the turbulent fluid flow, whereas the fractional step method is used to solve the pressure-velocity coupling. The method has been thoroughly tested in several test cases. In the present article the influence of the application of electromagnetic braking on the macro-segregation in the continuous-casting process for carbon steel is presented.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4100603