Analysis of Internal Cracks in Continuous Casting Slabs with Soft Reduction

Abstract

The formation of internal cracks in continuous casting slabs is mainly attributed to the strain status and microsegregation near the solidifying front of the slabs. By analyzing the internal cracks of medium carbon microalloy steel, the obtained conclusions are that C, P, S, etc. enrich in dendrites and exist in grain boundaries, but these are just the internal causes, and the root cracking causes the tensile stress of solidification front. When the slab passes through the straightening segments, the liquid core thickness is large, and the liquid steel in the space of columnar crystals is not completely frozen. Therefore, the reduction effect of rollers results in the strain of solidification front exceeding the critical value. However, the corresponding strain in the arc and horizontal segments does not exceed this critical value, so the solidification front in the straightening segments would be much easy to crack. The statistics analysis shows that after soft reduction and straightening process are separately carried out, the occurrence rate of intermediate cracks is reduced by 41.3%.

Keywords

• internal cracks
• continuous casting slab
• strain analysis
• microsegregation
• finite element model