Projects : Continuous Casting Cooling

The objective of this study is to model the cooling of a moving solid strip using water jets. The simulation requires tracking the liquid–solid interface, modeling potential nucleate boiling at the boundary, and solving heat transfer within the product, incorporating both diffusion and convection under a fixed velocity field.

After several initial attempts, the final approach involved developing a conjugate heat transfer solver. This solver couples an incompressible Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) method with phase change modeling in fluid regions and a simplified heat transfer solver in solid regions. Nucleate boiling is represented as a source term in the energy equation on the liquid side of the liquid–solid interface.

Preliminary assessments using the Lee evaporation model yielded inconsistent results. Therefore, a reference case was used to calibrate the model coefficients, resulting in simulations that closely matched experimental data.

The final simulations demonstrated good agreement with measurements and successfully captured key features of the cooling process.