ALEXANDER VAKHRUSHEV 1 , MENGHUAI WU 1 , ANDREAS LUDWIG 2 , GERALD NITZL 3 , YONG TANG 3 , GERNOT HACKL 3 EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF A 3-PHASE CONTINUOUS CASTING SIMULATION USING A WATER MODEL Abstract In the continuous casting (CC) mold, a stable meniscus is crucial so the covering slag layer effectively protects molten steel from oxidation. In practice it is difficult to control due to the special flow pattern in the mold region. Therefore, a modeling approach was investigated to predict and optimize the casting process by stabilizing the meniscus. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) approach was utilized to model the mold flow including the free surface behavior in a 3-phase liquid steel/slag/air system on the basis of the OpenFOAM® finite volume method (FVM) open-source CFD package. Before applying this approach to industry, laboratory experiments with a water model, comprising a 1/3 scaled-down conventional mold, were performed to evaluate the numerical model. An oil layer was used to mimic the slag layer covering the meniscus. The evolution of the meniscus and distribution of the oil layer in response to the mold flow were experimentally recorded. In the numerical model, three phases were considered: water, oil and air. The preliminary simulation results were compared to the water modeling data. Some sensitive parameters for this model such as surface tension (interface free energy) and contact angle were also investigated. Keywords Free surface, numerical simulation, VOF, slag entrapment, surface tension, continuous casting 1. Introduction An accurate representation of the coupled effects between turbulent fluid flow and moving fluid-fluid interfaces is necessary for a realistic prediction/control of the continuous casting process. The evolution of the free interface, slag entrapment etc., makes this a very challenging task. After more than 30 years of numerical model and algorithm development, this is still not a concluded topic in CFD. A review of the wide range of computational methods (unstructured, structured and block-structured) is provided by Cross et al. [1] and reintroduces the challenges of generating rapid solutions with high-performance parallel cluster technology, as well as the computational speed issues when using various methods and different commercial CFD software. In the current studies the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method was employed based on its implementation in the OpenFOAM® open-source CFD software package [2]. Free-surface methodologies can be classified into surface tracking, moving mesh and volume tracking methods [3]: 1 Christian-Doppler Laboratory for Advanced Process Simulation of Solidification and Melting, University of Leoben, Austria 2 Chair of Simulation and Modeling of Metallurgy Processes, University of Leoben, Austria 3 RHI AG, Austria