CSM is a research Center undertaking extensive contract work all around Europe. In particular, there is a good record of achievements in ECSC Research and Demostration projects.
The present objectives of CSM activities are mainly in the field of steel production, special steels and alloys for highly specific uses, ceramics and matrix composites. CSM is also involved in technology transfer operations, consisting mainly of the design and development of innovative pilot plants whose objective is to simplify production cycles, to reduce environmental impact, and to develop materials and products.
CSM facilities for modelling in steelmaking and continuous casting are both numerical (own codes, commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics codes as PHOENICS) and physical, with system in full scale as well to reproduce metallurgical vessels.
As refers to thermo-fluid-dynamics simulations made with the CFD code PHOENICS, used for more than ten years, the topics under investigation refer to description of thermal and fluid flow in ladle, tundish and mould. On the basis of correlations between process features and product quality, the aim of this work is to achieve information useful in finding proper counter-measures to process problems or guidelines and to define proper casting operations or plant design.
Normally, complex simulations with coupled thermal and fluid flow description involve runs of about 8 hours on a workstation. The more precise is the description of the phenomenon of concern, the more complex is the model, that is, the higher the number of equations involved, and in turn the longer is the time calculation. Time calculation increases further for transient and multiphase phenomena, and also if grid coarsening occurs, i.e., a very detailed description of the domain is needed in order to describe in a narrow space the co-existing physical features (for example: solid, liquid and mushy zone in a few mm thickness in continuous casting mould during steel solidification). All these last aspects are becoming nowadays more and more important to describe fundamentals of steel solidification.
As a result, to have reliable simulations (detailed in reasonable time) one is required to have very powerful machines and in some case greater numbers of machines, in order to perform more simulations at the same time.
The interest of CSM in ADELFI can then be summarised into two main aims:
For this aim, representative case tests of the phenomena with which CSM is concerned have been set, from isothermal systems to those with change of state and/or multiphase.