Fluid Flow Control in a Billet Tundish during Steel Filling Operations

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the fist paragraph some text after first equation is the same like before first equation.

First paragraph should be divided for two separately chapters e.g.: introduction and/or simulation conditions.

Authors should add location of ladle shroud to tundish from figure 2.

Planes from figure 8 are for outlets line, therefore why on this figure ladle shroud is visible. If needed please explain in the text of paper.

Does the position of horizontal plane is steady or change on the figure 9. Please explain in the text of paper.

Table 2 need revision, some comas are exist instead of full-stop for dead volume and Cpeak.

Author Response

Dear Mr. Reviewer,

We corrected the repeated paragraph in the new manuscript.

Figure 2 is indicating the position of the ladle shroud in the new manuscript. Very good observation.

Very good question. Figure 8 is a view from the delta side of the tundish looking toward the flat-back plane. Therefore, the plane of the strands is in the background and the ladle shroud is in the front, this is the reason to be visible in this figure. We mention this in the new manuscript.

Yes, We corrected Table 2 in the new manuscript.

Thank you very much for your valuable time.

Reviewer 2 Report

Initially I thought this was to be yet another hash up of previous modelling on tundishes. However, this work has effectively tackled part of the process that has received little attention in previous studies. As a result it adds to the technology. However, until it is validated on a plant situation the overall merit of it has to be 'average'. 

Author Response

Dear Mr. Review,

We acknowledge your insightful comment. Let me tell you that in the very abundant literature of tundish metallurgy few attention is given to the unsteady operations. This is particularly certain in the case of startup of casting sequences where many steel casters suffer with the problem of early steel freezing in the strands. Therefore, we addressed the topic here.

We feel sorry that we could not get your full approval and we agree that to close this work there must be feedback from the plant. Unfortunately our customer is not eager to provide us information. However, the only prove that the thing go all well is that they are using inhibitor 3.

We give you the thanks for your valuable time.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper shows a suitable modelling approach and a reliable number of results shown to support the conclusions.

The parts that are recommended to improve refer to:

- more details on why certain T-solutions are 'better' (e.g., due to a specific T-geometry, leading to a different quantity of energy dissiped per unit volume ...)

- comments on the part concerning C-curves, that seems to be 'pasted' at the end of the paper (e.g. a comment on the fact that it is a technique referring to steady-state condition- constant vessel volume - whereas the paper refers to volume-varying conditions,

- more care in editing and structuring the report (e.g., duplication of rows 59-69 in 83-93; sentence in row 172 not very clear; TI2 in caption of figures 7 and 8 instead of TI3; different character in rows 238-243 and Conclusions; overalpping among Table 2 and figure 12).

Finally, the Literature reported seems to be somewhat auto-referencing, as there are several further examples of investigation on transient flows in tundish.

Author Response

Dear Mr. Reviewer,

We have corrected in the new manuscript all misshapes the uncarefully we committed, All these errors are corrected in the new manuscript.

About the C curves we clarify their nature and justify their introduction at the end of the paper. Twofold purposes are pursued; first to corroborate the predictive capacity of the math model y second to see that the flow patterns during the filling operations remains during the steady state operations. 

Yes, we use our own work to led this work. Perhaps it looks a little weird. The reason is that we have been working in these problems for some time and interesting is but not much research is published addressing them. We apologize.

Finally, we give you the thanks for your well pointed aspects that our paper was missing.