Investigation on prediction of steel slab heating characteristics in a walking beam heating furnace

This paper presents a method for the prediction of temperature distribution in a walking beam furnace chamber and slabs, this method is realized by coupling the steady thermal process in the furnace chamber and transient heat conduction process in the slab, these two processes exchange heat flux and temperature conditions on the surface of slabs. The movement of the slab is taken into account by changing boundary condition at different time, transient radiative heating characteristics is predicted by the finite-volume method for radiation. The three-dimensional entity model is imported from 3D software Solid Edge. Iterations are simulated in the commercial program Fluent respectively. Visual Basic language is developed to generate batched file and control the alternate execution of steady and transient processes. When temperature of a slab does not change, calculation is considered to have converged and is stopped. A reasonable agreement is found between this method and previous work for the prediction of thermal behavior of the slab in the heating furnace. Heating characteristics of a slab during the residence time inside the heating furnace are described precisely.