A longitudinal field causes no braking of the flow, but the resistive damping is still operative. The quality of the solidified steel depends to a large extent upon the degree of control during solidification. The solidification issues are therefore of great importance. The resulting structure is finer on the contact side, due to the higher heat transfer rate, and coarsens across the thickness of the strip. The solidification process is primarily controlled by the heat transfer.
Heat flows from the liquid metal to the heat-extracting conveyor belt.
When the liquid metal reaches fusion temperature it solidifies onto a growing shell of steady state shape that is continuously conveyed downstream. The main difficulty in the determination of the growth of the solidification front is the coupling between heat and fluid flow. For the case of constant material properties, the heat flow is coupled to the fluid flow in terms of advection and the fluid flow is coupled to the heat flow by the boundary conditions at the solidification front. In this study we derive analytical results for the initial solidification process of a pure liquid metal over a moving boundary with a finite heat transfer coefficient. For the case of zero superheat in the melt, the initial growth of the solidified metal is immediate and linear.