Fluid-Flow and Stress Analysis of Steel Continuous Casting

Brian Thomas, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

This project aims to advance current state-of-the-art computationally-intensive models of turbulent fluid flow, magnetohydrodynamics, particle transport, interfacial behavior, heat transfer, solidification, and thermal-mechanical behavior in the continuous casting of steel, and to apply those models to gain practical insights to improve this important manufacturing process. Specifically, advanced multiphase flow simulations will be conducted to get insights into transient defect formation, and to find safe operating windows of adjustable casting conditions. The multi-GPU code CUFLOW has been developed and tested on Blue Waters XK node, with Nvidia K20x GPU co-processors, and shows good speed up. Recent testing of commercial code, ANSYS FLUENT also shows good scaling on Blue Waters. Blue Waters is needed to shorten simulation times (currently several months on workstations), to enable better mesh refinement, tracking of all particles and interface motion, which is important for accurate multiphase flow simulation. Transient thermal-stress models of the solidifying dendritic microstructure will be applied to investigate strain concentration and the formation of longitudinal cracks, again requiring very fine computational meshes, only possible on Blue Waters.