Investigation of vortex flow patterns at the meniscus in a water caster mould

Vortices at the meniscus of the continuous casting mould can entrain mould powder into the liquid pool. The entrained globules will form slivers in the subsequent downstream processing of the slabs. This article presents a three-dimensional computational study of the vortexing at the meniscus with an emphasis on capturing flow behaviours of vortices in continuous casting mould. We have used ANSYS FLUENT 19.2 a commercial CFD package. Two turbulence models, namely standard k-ω model and shear stress transport (SST) k-ω model, are employed in this work. The performance of the two turbulence models has been evaluated by comparing the flow measurements from 0.4-scale water model experiments. Both the turbulence models could capture vortices at the top surface. The transient vortex flow characteristics such as formation, expansion (and sustenance), thinning, merging and dissipation of the rotational flow are also predicted by the numerical simulations. In general, the standard k-ω model and the SST k-ω model exhibited good capability in predicting the complex, unsteady and turbulent vortex flow phenomena at the meniscus in continuous casting mould.