A meshless thermomechanical travelling-slice model of continuous casting of steel

The travelling slice approximation of continuous casting process is widely used in industrial practice to model the heat transfer and solidification. Short computational times that are possible due to the reduction from three to two dimensions compensate for lower accuracy introduced by the approximation. In the same spirit, the travelling slice approximation is also used for the thermomechanical model in the present paper. The model includes contributions from metallostatic pressure, thermal contraction and viscoplastic deformation to describe the stress in the material slice. It incorporates simple models to predict the hot tearing and cracking. The model is solved with a novel strong-form meshless method. It allows flexible adaptive node distribution to accurately describe the behaviour in the solidifying region. In this paper we focus on the two-way coupling of the heat transfer and deformation of the strand to model the air-gap formation in the initial stage of the casting process and to study the emergent behaviour that is the result of this coupling. We find that the inclusion of the air-gap model significantly changes the stress distribution in the corners of the strand because of the reheating caused by the reduced heat-transfer.