Extending the life of the tundish and lining of the intermediate ladle in a six-strand continuous bar-casting machine

Continuous steel-bar casting on a multistrand machine in superlong series is limited by the working-layer wear of the intermediate ladle’s lining within the slag band and the region of jet incidence. The lining life may be significantly increased by using high-strength concrete tundishes of special geometric shape, taking account of the specific ladle and the casting conditions. A fundamentally new metal-intake design for the casting of superlong series at multistrand continuous bar-casting machines is investigated. In the converter shop at OAO Enakievskii Metallurgicheskii Zavod, a casting series of maximum length 64 melts proves possible. This corresponds to the casting of 9300 t of steel from a single intermediate ladle. For optimal organizational and technological conditions, increase in this characteristic by a factor of 1.5–1.6 may be expected.