Numerical simulation on solidification and thermal stress of continuous casting billet in mold based on meshless methods

An integrated meshless thermal–mechanical analysis system is developed with a meshless solidification model based on Finite Point Method (FPM) and the Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) method based elastic–plastic analysis model. The system is applied to simulate the solidification process and the thermal stress of continuous casting billet in mold. The results were consistent with the measurement and well explained the characteristics of stress and strain distribution and the formation mechanism of the off-corner defects. The computational accuracy was as good as when finite element method (FEM) was used, while taking advantage of rapid computation as well as flexible and dynamic node distribution. A large deformation case is presented in this paper, which was solved by employing Lagrange description in the MLPG scheme. The results show the potential crack problem due to the incorrect cooling and reduction parameters in continuous casting production. These observations show that meshless method could be a powerful numerical analysis tool for the study of continuous casting processes, especially in solving mechanical reduction production with large deformation and crack problems.