Flow monitoring for continuous steel casting using Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography (CIFT)

The control of the liquid steel flow in the mould of a continuous caster based on real time flow measurements is a challenging task due to the lack of appropriate measurement techniques. The opaqueness, the high temperature of 1500 C and the chemical aggressiveness of the melt require non-optical contactless methods. In order to reconstruct the complex flow structure in the mould, the Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography (CIFT) is a promising candidate, since it allows the visualization of the flow structure in the melt by applying a magnetic field to the melt, measuring the flow induced perturbation of that field and solving subsequently a linear inverse problem. The combination of this new measurement technique with typical electromagnetic actuators like electromagnetic brakes used in continuous casting, pose a challenge to the CIFT measurement system, because the flow induced magnetic field is in the range of 100 nT and has to be measured robustly on the background of the static magnetic field with the amplitude of 300 mT generated by the brake. In this work we will show recent developments regarding this topic for a small model of a continuous caster in the lab.
Furthermore, we will present a new method on how the complex linear inverse problem can be solved in real time providing a time resolution of about 1 Hz.