Investigation on Thermo-mechanical Behavior of Mold Corner for Continuous Casting Slab

Corner cracks in slab and billet have always been the important issues during continuous casting. For the purpose of investigating heat transfer, stress and distortion behaviors of corner regions for the slab continuous casting mold, a full-scale stress model of mold which integrated finite-element method with inverse heat transfer algorithm was developed. An inverse algorithm was applied to calculate the heat flux through the measured temperatures from thermocouples buried inside mold plates. Based on this, a full-scale finite-element stress model, including four copper plates, nickel layer and water slots of different depths, was built to reveal the complex thermo-mechanical behavior of mold corners. The results show that the corner regions generate large stress and obvious stress concentration. The mold bends toward the molten steel and it appears V-shaped distortion in the corner region. And the area of water slots decrease after distortion, but it would not apparently affect heat transfer. The cooling effect could be optimized by changing the position, depth and angle of sloped water slots, which helps to flexibly improve the solidification behavior of slab corner.