Heat-flux measurements of industrial on-site continuous copper casting and their use as boundary conditions for numerical simulations

An embedded sensor, designed for rapid and accurate response times and using wireless data transmission, has been developed for the on-site measurement of temperatures in industrial continuous casting moulds. The sensor has been used to measure the temperature at several points in the mould during production in a Southwire copper casting process. The measured data has been used to calculate the temperature gradient in the mould to estimate the heat flux through it; this is then used as a boundary condition for numerical simulations of solidification. For these, we employ a method that tracks the solidification front explicitly; this has an advantage over fixed-grid methods in simulations for materials having a short solidification interval, since the release of latent heat at the solidification front can be resolved without resorting to a very fine mesh. The special considerations required for setting the initial condition for the numerical scheme and the time taken for the superheated melt to form a solid shell are also discussed.