Coupled Visco-Plastic Thermo-Mechanical Models of Steel Solidification

Coupled thermo-mechanical models based on highly nonlinear elastic visco-plastic constitutive laws are applied to simulate simultaneous development of temperature and stress that occurs during steel solidification in continuous casting processes. The efficient and robust local visco-plastic integration scheme [Koric 2006] is implemented into both implicit and explicit FE commercial software ABAQUS/Standard and ABAQUS/Explicit via user defined subroutines VUMAT and UMAT. The models are first verified with a semi-analytical solution [Weiner 1963], and later they are applied to simulate 2D and 3D transverse sections of a thin slab caster under realistic operating conditions as they move down the mold. The execution times of the implicit and explicit parallel solvers performing some of these highly computationally demanding analyses are benchmarked on the latest high performance computing platforms.