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During high-speed continuous casting, the effect of secondary cooling on the quality of the billet is more obvious, and the possibility of quality problems is higher. This study takes the continuous casting machine producing 165 mm × 165 mm billet as the research object. The six different secondary cooling schemes are designed with the 4.5 m/min casting speed. By comparing the shell deformation, surface stress, surface temperature recovery, and metallurgical lengths at different secondary cooling schemes, the secondary cooling scheme applied in the high-speed continuous casting process is selected. The results show that the surface temperature recovery and stress of the billet in Scheme 1 are higher than those of other cooling schemes. The metallurgical length and shell deformation of the billet in Scheme 4 are higher than those of other cooling schemes. In Schemes 2, 3, 5, and 6, the shell deformation of Schemes 3 and 5 is higher than that of Schemes 2 and 6. In Schemes 2 and 6, the maximum surface central stress of the continuous casting billet in the secondary cooling zone is 36.3 MPa and 31 MPa, respectively. Scheme 6 is used as the secondary cooling scheme of high-speed continuous casting in this study. The water quantity in secondary cooling zone 1 ~ 5 segments of Scheme 6 is 28 m 3 /h, 31 m 3 /h, 16 m 3 /h, 10 m 3 /h, and 6 m 3 /h, respectively. Finally, the industrial trial is carried out, which proves that Scheme 6 can be applied to high-speed continuous casting.

To address challenges such as the high variability of variables and difficulties in feature extraction during the casting process of the continuous casting machine’s sector segment, a fault diagnosis method based on SG-PCA-LSTM is proposed. This method aims to overcome the issue of fault features obscured by noise in the total tension time series by employing the SG smoothing algorithm for filtering and denoising. By leveraging the inter-segment data correlation and the advantage of PCA in extracting fault feature information, combined with the powerful learning capability of LSTM in modeling, a Principal Component Analysis - Long Short-Term Memory (PCA-LSTM) fault diagnosis model is established. Through comparative analysis against different diagnostic methods in terms of recognition rate, false positive rate, etc., the results obtained by this method are compared against those obtained by using other algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits good overall performance in terms of accuracy and training time.

The φ16 mm single-crystal copper rod billet was prepared by the heated mold horizontal continuous casting process. After cold drawing + 600 °C× 5 s annealing to φ1 mm, the annealed φ1 mm single-crystal copper processing wire was cold drawn to φ0.2 mm (φ1 mm → φ0.2 mm), and the electrical conductivity, tensile strength and microstructure evolution of single-crystal copper wire were compared and analyzed. The research shows that the conductivity of the as-cast single-crystal copper rod is 102.1% IACS, the tensile strength is 141 MPa, the conductivity is as high as 97.26% IACS, after cold drawing to φ0.2 mm, and the tensile strength is greatly increased to 506 MPa. Compared with the as-cast properties, the electrical conductivity of the as-drawn wire is only reduced by 4.7%, while the tensile strength is increased by 258.9%. The as-cast rod exhibits typical characteristics of single-crystal copper; with the increasing amount of deformation, the microstructure evolves in the following form: dislocations generated by slip entanglement into dislocation cells → microstrip structure → layered structure → twin structure. A prediction model for the strength and electrical conductivity of single-crystal copper wire was constructed. The results show that grain refinement strengthening and dislocation strengthening are the key factors affecting the strength and conductivity of single-crystal copper wire, when deformed to φ0.2 mm, and twinning strengthening is superimposed in the above strengthening mechanism.

Frequent delays will be experienced in the start-up of molten steel on the converter equipment during the steelmaking–continuous casting (SCC) production process due to the untimely supply of molten iron or scrap, which may cause conflicts between adjacent heat on the same equipment or in the same casting. The casting machine is cut off, resulting in the failure of the static scheduling plan. SCC production ladle re-scheduling is based on the premise that the production process path remains unchanged, the operation of adjacent heat on the converter and refining furnace does not conflict, and the casting of adjacent heat within the same casting is continuous. The ladle re-scheduling of steelmaking and continuous casting production aims at continuously casting many charges with the same cast and avoiding conflicts of adjacent charges on the same machine. This mechanism proposes a method of ladle re-scheduling in the production process of steelmaking–refining–continuous casting, which is divided into two parts: plan re-scheduling and ladle optimisation scheduling. Firstly, a re-scheduling optimisation model of the steelmaking and continuous casting production is built. This model aims at minimising the waiting time of all charges. The re-scheduling strategy of steelmaking and continuous casting production is proposed by interval processing time of charges and scheduling expert experience. This strategy is composed of two parts: re-scheduling charge decision and charge processing machine decision. Then, the first-order rule learning is used to select the optimisation target to establish the ladle optimal scheduling model. The ladle matching rules are extracted on the basis of the rule reasoning of the minimum general generalisation. The ladle optimisation scheduling method that consists of the optimal selection of the ladle and the preparation of the optimal path of the ladle is proposed. Ladle selection is based on the production process and adopts rule-based reasoning to select decarburised ladle after choosing dephosphorised ladle. Ladle path preparation, which is a multi-priority heuristic method, is designed to decide the path of the ladle from the converter to the refining furnace to the continuous casting machine. Finally, this mechanism was actually verified based on the large-scale data of a steel company in Shanghai, China. Results showed that the production efficiency of steelmaking-refining-continuous casting was improved.

Results of computational experiments on studying multiphase flow and interphase interaction in the volume of an industrial 50-ton tundish of a continuous caster, including when blowing with argon through bottom blowing blocks, are presented. A mathematical model has been developed that makes it possible to predict the dynamics of melt mixing at a given casting speed. The pattern of influence of the layout of the ladle’s working space on the area of “stagnant zones” in the ladle volume has been found.

In order to save equipment investment, the commercial continuous caster is widely used to produce diverse round bloom with a compatible final electromagnetic stirring (F-EMS) device, and thus, the eccentric final electromagnetic stirring is commonly observed during the continuous casting process. In this study, based on our previously proposed three-phase solidification model for continuous casting process, the effect of eccentric F-EMS on the magnetic field, solidification structure, and macrosegregation are fully investigated in the 42CrMoS4 steel continuously cast round bloom with diameter of 350, 450, 550, and 650 mm, respectively. The eccentric degrees of geometric, electromagnetic force, velocity, and solute concentration are introduced to clarify the effect of eccentric F-EMS on electromagnetic force, stirring velocity, and macrosegregation. The results indicate the eccentric round bloom solidification structure is mainly caused by the grain sedimentation during the solidification process, which is benefit for the equiaxed grains accumulation at the front of columnar grains and leads the columnar to equiaxed transition (CET) later the inner arc side than on the external arc side of round bloom. But the eccentric solidification structure of round bloom is almost not affected by the eccentric F-EMS, because the location of F-EMS is at 15.0 m from the meniscus, and the CET has occurred in the round bloom before the application of F-EMS. Moreover, the eccentric F-EMS has an influence on the electromagnetic field, stirring velocity, and solute concentration in the round bloom. Both the electromagnetic force and stirring velocity on the inner arc side are lower than those on the external arc side with eccentric F-EMS. The negative segregation difference near the center of the round bloom becomes more pronounced, and the center positive segregation also increases as the geometric eccentricity increases. When the geometric eccentric degrees are 15.4, 30.8, and 46.2 pct, the eccentric degrees of electromagnetic force are, respectively, 44.7, 54.1, and 64.1 pct, the eccentric degrees of maximum tangential velocity are, respectively, 20.0, 33.3, and 50.0 pct, the eccentric degrees of negative segregation induced by the F-MES are, respectively, 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1 pct, and the center segregation ratios are, respectively, 1.08, 1.09, and 1.10.

The iron and steel industry is energy-intensive due to the large volume of steel produced and its high-temperature and high-weight characteristics, sensors such as high-temperature application sensors can be utilized to collect production data and support the process control and optimization. Steelmaking-refining-continuous casting (SRCC) is a bottleneck in the iron and steel production process. SRCC scheduling problems are worldwide problems and NP-hard. The problems are not only important for iron and steel enterprises to enhance production efficiency, but also play a significant role in saving energy and reducing resource consumption. SRCC scheduling problems can be modeled as hybrid flowshop scheduling problems with batch production at the last stage. In this paper, a Discrete Brain Storm Optimization (DBSO) algorithm is proposed to handle SRCC scheduling problems. In the proposed DBSO, population initialization and cluster center replacement are specially designed to enhance the intensification abilities. Moreover, a perturbation operator is devised to enhance its diversification abilities. Furthermore, a new individual generation operator is devised to improve the intensification and diversification abilities simultaneously. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed DBSO is an efficient method for solving SRCC scheduling problems.

In this paper, for ϕ800mm round billet vertical continuous casting process, a computational study of the effect of Final electromagnetic stirring (F-EMS) at positions (7.5 m, 9 m, 10.5 m and 12 m) from the meniscus of mold on fluid flow and heat transfer has been carried out. Considering the influence of the solidified shell thickness on magnetic field. The thicker the solidified shell, the smaller the magnetic induction intensity and electromagnetic force inside the billet. Once the position is shifted down by 1.5 m, the thickness of the solidified shell increases by about 21 mm and the magnetic induction intensity at the center of the billet decreases by about 6mT. According to the velocity and the 3-D streamline distribution, at the position 7.5 m from the meniscus of mold, the flow velocity is 0.01158 m·s −1 and part of the molten steel has an obvious upward recirculation zone. Moving the position from 9 to 10.5 m, the stirring range and flow velocity are reduced. The flow velocity is 0.00206 m·s −1 at the position 12 m from the meniscus of mold and the molten steel has no effective flow. Electromagnetic stirring accelerates the heat transfer and uniform temperature. It has a great effect on the core temperature, but a little effect on the solidified shell temperature. After adding F-EMS, the core temperature decreased by 2–5 K. As the position moves down from 7.5 to 12 m from the meniscus of mold, the radial length of the action range decreases from 0.13 to 0.03 m. The effective action range of uniform temperature is basically equal to the radial length of liquid fraction f l  ≥ 0.7. The industrial experimental results show that adding F-EMS at 9.3 m away from the meniscus of mold can improve the porosity, crack and segregation to a certain extent.

To achieve the desired superheat of molten steel during the continuous casting process, optimization of process parameters such as molten steel temperature in ladle furnace, casting speed, and baking temperature is necessary. Therefore, obtaining the superheat corresponding to these process parameters in advance is particularly important. To address this issue, a model for predicting the temperature of molten steel in the tundish during continuous casting is designed. The model adopts a combined modeling approach of mechanistic model and data model. To address the issue of the mechanism model’s inability to capture the variation of the lining’s thermal parameters, this article improves the traditional physics-informed neural network (PINN) algorithm. It combines the constraints from both the forward and inverse problems, allowing for obtaining solutions to the equations while capturing the variation of equation parameters. Actual data from multiple casting sequences at a steel plant are collected to validate the accuracy and interpretability of the model. The results show that the error of the model is about 2.1k which has better accuracy compared to pure mechanistic model and pure data model. Additionally, it can capture the variation patterns of tundish lining thermal parameters under different operating conditions. Therefore, the model designed in this article can provide both profound physical interpretation ability and more practical predictions of molten steel temperature.

Mold structure and cooling parameters are significant factors that affect the heat transfer capacity of high-speed continuous casting molds of billets. Therefore, a three-dimensional fluid flow and heat transfer model of a 160 mm × 160 mm billet mold was established, and its accuracy was verified. Thereby, the characteristics of heat transfer and influences of mold structure and cooling parameters on heat transfer in the high-speed continuous casting billet mold region were revealed. It was found that extending the effective length of a mold is the most valuable method to improve its heat transfer capability and achieve high-speed continuous casting. The total heat and the shell thickness at a mold outlet increased by 19% and 9.21% on average with every 100 mm extension. Enlarging the fillet radius could enhance the uniformity of heat transfer in the mold. Considering the loss of material, the optimal fillet radius of the mold was determined to be R = 10 mm.