Thermo-mechanical Model of Solidification Processes: Implementation in Abaqus and Application to Continuous Casting of Steel

Many manufacturing and fabrication processes such as foundry shape casting, continuous casting and welding have common solidification phenomena, such as thermal stress development. One of the most important and complex among them is continuous casting which produces 90% of steel today. A new computationally efficient algorithm has been implemented into the commercial package Abaqus using a user-defined subroutine (UMAT) to solve for thermal stresses, strains, and displacements in realistic continuous casting processes which involve highly nonlinear constitutive relations. The model is successfully validated with available analytical solidification solutions and applied to simulate temperature and stress development of a solidifying steel shell in several continuous casting molds under realistic operating conditions. Besides continuous casting, the model from this book can be a valuable tool in modeling other classes of metal and nonmetal materials with highly nonlinear time-dependant constitutive laws.