The transition of slag infiltration and corresponding casting responses during virtual casting

Towards Smart Manufacturing: Digital Twin for Continuous Casters

Swerim has successfully developed a state-of-art numerical model for continuous casting through the RFCS NNEWFLUX project. This new technology enables virtual casting with Digital Twins for industrial slab and billet casters.

The trend of digitalization in manufacturing (e.g., Industry 4.0 or Smart manufacturing etc.) demands the steelmaking industry to adapt quickly to new paradigms. To satisfy the clear need from the steel industry for this trend, Swerim has developed a Digital Twin technology for continuous casters: This virtual replica allows digitalization of industrial casters and facilitates the steelmaking process to shift towards “Smart steelmaking” through integration with emerging technologies including IoT platform, new sensor technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This Digital Twin enables casting arbitrary steel grades with different casting powders in a virtual space and provides transparent access to the diverse process properties which are difficult to measure in real systems due to the highly adverse operating conditions. Since continuous casting is a complex metallurgical process including diverse physics fully coupled with each other, it is important to consider the whole physics simultaneously: The Digital Twin takes into account the Multiphysics nature of the casting process including multiphase turbulent flow, heat transfer, solidification, magnetohydrodynamics, solid mechanics and chemical kinetics. This provides a comprehensive tool for benchmarking casting powders as well as finding optimal operation ranges to improve the quality of cast products in contrast to costly trial-error tests in the plants.

Contacts

  • Hyunjin Yang, hyunjin.yang [at] swerim.se,
  • Pavel Ramirez Lopez, pavel.ramirez.lopez [at] swerim.se

Figure 1. The transition of slag infiltration and corresponding casting responses during virtual casting[1]

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[1] Yang et al., Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B 2021, DOI: 10.1007/s11663-021-02209-3