Fast beam blank casting: a proof of concept

Environment standards are becoming even more demanding year after year, especially in terms of allowed emissions, both for carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Steel industry is facing this challenge in several ways; recently the production processes for some steel products, such as rebar and smooth round, have made a big step forward adopting the “direct rolling” paradigm: the cast section coming from casting machine is directly sent to rolling mill, without intermediate reheating furnace. This makes possible to eliminate the related emissions as well as reduce the OpEx. Up to now this technology has not yet been applied to the beam production, due to the limitations of casting process. In this paper an improved version of travelling slice model, enriched with the Niyama parameter, has been used for the evaluation of a possible high-speed beam blank casting process. It has shown encouraging results in terms of internal quality prediction.