Patent ID: 7025118

Claim:
A method of continuously casting blooms, slabs or thin slabs comprising the steps of: (a) introducing a steel melt into a mold shaped to produce a continuous strand emerging from a bottom of said mold and formed by a progressively solidifying shell of steel surrounding a core of the molten steel filling a melt cavity in said shell; (b) spray cooling said strand as said strand emerges from said mold in a plurality of successive strand-guide segments each of which comprises a pair of mutually spaced sets of guide rollers receiving the strand between them, at least one of said segments spaced below said mold having the sets of guide rollers thereof tapering toward one another to form a soft-reduction stretch within which solidification of the strand is completed over the entire cross section of the strand and in which a tip of the melt cavity is formed; and (c) controlledly reducing a thickness of said strand between said soft-reduction stretch and said mold between rollers of at least one format-reducing roller pair so that independently of the quality of the steel, the casting speed and the spray cooling, the position of said tip along the soft-reduction stretch is maintained approximately constant.