Continuous Steel Casting Simulation Facility Pluton
The PLUTON facility is a water-based model of the liquid steel distribution within the tundish of a continuous casting process. It has been designed to allow for non-intrusive optical measurements such as PIV or LDV. The facility has been built to accommodate different tundish shapes and allow their performance to be characterized using optical techniques.
For this purpose, a double shell is used to avoid optical disturbances to the light from dioptric effects at the tundish walls.
The inner shell is the only part of the facility that must be changed to study different tundish designs. Automatic control of inlet and outlet flow rates to the vessel is provided. The outer shell is 2.11 m long, 0.69 m wide and 0.385 m high. Quarter-scale models are currently studied in the facility.
