In pursuit of high productivity, energy saving, steel type versatility, and more stringent quality, each engineering company of steel making equipment has mad

In pursuit of high productivity, energy saving, steel type versatility, and more stringent quality, each engineering company of steel making equipment has made a variety of unique development and improvements of continuous casting machines since its full-scale practical applications in the 1960s. Kobe Steel has newly developed an optimal support mechanism for a large tundish, and a highly precise weighing device for tundish cars, which are closely related to safety and workability. In addition, the company has newly developed a structure, capable of maintaining high rigidity and movements without backlash for an extended period of time, for the mold oscillator and supporting roll stand, which can significantly affect the quality of cast blooms. This paper introduces these technologies, which have been employed in the continuous bloom casting equipment for special steel-equipment that was delivered to Kobe Steel's Kakogawa Works in January 2017.

Continuous casting equipment is used to continuously cool and solidify molten steel, and its apparatuses must demonstrate stable performance in a high temperature environment. In the periphery of the continuous casting machine (CCM), which is located the farthest upstream, there are large apparatuses such as a ladle turret, tundish, and tundish car, which slew, lift, and/or travel in a three-dimensionally interlacing manner. The No. 6 continuous casting equipment at Kobe Steel's Kakogawa Works, recently delivered by Kobe Steel, includes a casting machine that handles a ladle containing 240 tonnes of molten steel. Any trouble with the casting machine during the handling of molten steel can lead to a serious accident. Hence, each apparatus must have excellent workability and high reliability. In the main CCM equipment (e.g., mold, mold oscillator, and supporting roll stand), which is located in the downstream of the pig bed, a primary solidified shell is formed in the mold, and the solidified shell is grown by spray cooling in the secondary cooling zone to continuously produce semi-finished slabs. In order to manufacture a high-quality slab without any hazardous cracks on the surface or inside, no strain exceeding the allowable limit should be applied to the slab during solidification. The mold, mold oscillator, and supporting roll stand are required to have structures with high rigidity and to move without backlash so as to allow each slab to be accurately drawn along the track even under high-temperature high-load conditions.