Waste heat recovery technology in continuous casting process

The study has been conducted on waste heat recovery (WHR) field in a continuous casting process at an integrated steel mill. The goal was to analyze an innovative heat recovery solution to accomplish energy efficiency opportunities, increase the sustainability, synergies with other industrial continuous operations, and protect the environment, as well as save costs. A real-world application for heat recovery from solids using WHR after oxygen cutting machines of slabs in continuous casting process has been proposed. To study new ways to reduce energy use and emissions, a numerical simulation software was used. The solution proposed has two main items: first, waste heat is covered by a steel thermal shield, and second, is a progressive absorption of waste heat by the water flow in pipeline zone, which is placed inside of the thermal shield. With the expected design and optimized solution, a maximum difference in temperature between inlet and outlet water (∆Tw) of 90 °C and a system performance (ε) around 77 % could be obtained within operation constraints.