Reducing skid marks on steel slabs by developing an improved design scheme of water beam

Due to the existence of cooling water pipes and thermoduric skids in the walking beam type reheating furnace, skid marks always occur on the bottom of the steel slab and the quality of the steel slab is seriously affected. In this paper, the coupled heat transfer model among steel slab, water beam, furnace gas and furnace walls is established to accurately simulate the reheating process of the steel slab. The discrete ordinates method (DOM) is adopted to solve radiative heat transfer problem in reheating furnace. To get closer to the real situation, the relative movement between steel slab and thermoduric skid is taken into account strictly. The formation process of skid mark is clarified based on the calculated results of coupled heat transfer, and an improved design scheme for water beam is proposed to make the new skid marks produced after water beam dislocation not overlap each other, which effectively reduces the skid marks. Our study can provide helpful advising for the improvement of steel slab quality and the design of water beam structure in reheating furnace.