A Truncated Transient Slab Model for a Reheating Furnace

Abstract

This paper considers the steel reheating process, in which cold slabs are reheated to a temperature suitable for hot rolling operations. Temperature uniformity within the slab is very important during reheating, as non-uniformities often lead to quality concerns in the later stages of the production process. Attaining slab temperature uniformity is quite challenging, therefore, a thorough understanding of the reheating process becomes very important. Due to the extreme conditions inside the furnace, numerical tools like computational fluid dynamics are necessary for such situations. However, when applied to these complex installations, it often leads to very lengthy computational times. This paper develops a computationally efficient transient model to simulate the environment around a slab. This Truncated Transient Slab Model is a coupled model: it uses the temperature and flow profiles from a full-scale steady-state simulation and imposes those on a smaller domain that represents the immediate environment around the slab. The efficiency of the model is compared to the state of the art. With the simulations available in the literature, it was found that the proposed model can simulate a furnace seven times larger (grid size), with much higher grid and time resolutions, using only a third of the computational resources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The results of this paper are obtained within the framework of the Baekeland Mandate which is jointly funded by VLAIO Vlaams Agentschap Innoveren En Ondernemen (Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship) and ArcelorMittal, Belgium. The participation of Ghent University is also acknowledged.

Notes on contributors

Zaaquib Yunus Ahmed

Zaaquib Yunus Ahmed holds a M.Sc. in computational mechanics from University of Stuttgart, Germany. He successfully defended his Ph.D. on thermal modeling of high temperature furnaces. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the research group Sustainable Thermo-Fluid Energy Systems of the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at Ghent University. His research includes studying fluid flow behavior using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and is currently working on modeling fluid flow and heat transfer in bearings using CFD.

Ilya T’Jollyn

Ilya T’Jollyn received his M.Sc. degree in Electromechanical Engineering from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium in 2014. In 2021, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation with the title “Assessment of Nucleate Pool Boiling Heat Transfer and Critical Heat Flux for Power Electronics Cooling with a Low-GWP Refrigerant.” He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the research group Sustainable Thermo-Fluid Energy Systems of the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at Ghent University. His research interests include heat transfer in electrical machines and systems, and he is currently working on two-phase power electronics cooling and innovative motor cooling techniques.

Steven Lecompte

Steven Lecompte is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Energy, Metals, Mechanical Construction and Systems, Ghent University, Belgium since 2019. He obtained his master and Ph.D. degrees in Electromechanical Engineering at Ghent University in 2012 and 2016, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis was titled “Performance evaluation of organic Rankine cycle architectures: Application to waste heat valorization.” For his master thesis, he received the ArcelorMittal prize. His research is on thermal machines, including thermo-economic optimization, multi-phase processes, expanders, and compressors. In 2016 and 2018 he was a visiting researcher at Imperial College London for in total 5 months doing research on multiphase flows. In 2017 he obtained a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO). He is chair of the KCORC (Knowledge Center on Organic Rankine Cycle Technology) and on the editorial board “Koelplatform.” He is the author or coauthor of more than 60 scholarly articles or conference papers

Thomas Schoonjans

Thomas Schoonjans received his M.Sc. degree in Electromechanical Engineering from Ghent University in 2020. He then continued as a researcher at the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at Ghent University, Belgium for two years. Research interests include general heat transfer problems, thermal management of electrical drivetrains and thermal modeling in computational fluid dynamics. He is currently working as a support manager production & quality hot dip galvanization line at ArcelorMittal Ghent.

Toon Demeester

Toon Demeester obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electromechanical Engineering at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2016 and 2020, respectively. His doctoral research was focused on the development of fast numerical methods for steady free surface flows, using efficient quasi-Newton techniques in combination with computational fluid dynamics. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University’s Department of Electro-mechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering.

Wim Beyne

Wim Beyne obtained his master’s degree in Electromechanical Engineering Magna Cum Laude from Ghent University. In 2021, he successfully defended his Ph.D. on latent thermal energy storage heat exchangers. Since obtaining his Ph.D., he has been employed at Ghent University as a post-doctoral researcher.

Teun De Raad

Teun De Raad holds a M.Sc. (2000) in Mechanical Engineering from Twente University in The Netherlands. He has 20 years of experience working on the hot strip mill furnaces in ArcelorMittal Gent.

Michel De Paepe

Michel De Paepe is a Professor of Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer at the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the Ghent University. In 2002, he founded the research group Applied Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer. Research by this team, with about 15 Ph.D. students and 3 staff members, focuses on thermodynamics of new energy systems, performance of HVAC systems, and complex heat transfer phenomena in industrial applications, such as in compact heat exchangers, combustion engines, refrigerant two-phase flow, and electronics cooling.