Josef Štětina

Software Analytical Instrument for Assessment of the Process of Casting Slabs

The paper describes the original proposal of ways of solution and function of the program equipment for assessment of the process of casting slabs. The program system LITIOS was developed and implemented in EVRAZ Vitkovice Steel Ostrava on the equipment of continuous casting of steel (further only ECC). This program system works on the data warehouse of technological parameters of casting and quality parameters of slabs. It enables an ECC technologist to analyze the course of casting melt and with using statistics methods to set the influence of single technological parameters on the duality of final slabs. The system also enables long term monitoring and optimization of the production.

Steel Structure Prediction for Continuous Steel Casting by Means of a Parallel GPU-Based Heat Transfer and Solidification Model

Continuous casting of steel is currently a predominant production method of steel, which is used for more than 95% of the total world steel production. An effort of steelmakers is to cast high-quality steel with a desired structure and with a minimum number of defects, which reduce the productivity. The paper presents our developed GPU-based heat transfer and solidification model for continuous casting, which is coupled with a submodel used for the prediction of the steel micro-structure. The model is implemented in CUDA/C++, which allows for rapid computing on NVIDIA GPUs. The time-dependent temperature distribution calculated by the thermal model is iteratively passed to the submodel for the steel micro-structure prediction. The structural submodel determines the spatially-dependent rates of temperature change in the strand, for which the interdendritic solidification model IDS predicts the micro-structure of steel. The paper presents preliminary simulation results for the steel grade used for pressure vessel plates, which is sensitive to rapid cooling rates.Copyright