A CONTINUOUS CASTING MOLD FORMED OF PLATE ELEMENTS

摘要

The continuous strip casting machine has a vertically oriented open-topped mold cavity having downwardly moving sides that contain a pool of liquid metal. The cavity is wide at the top-center and tapers to the narrow thickness of the strip (34) being cast at the sides and bottom. The two wide sides of the cavity are each delineated by a matrix of contiguous plates (38) separated by narrow fissures, the surface of each plate being subdivided by narrow expansion joints. Each matrix is a many-facetted approximation of a doubly-curved surface, the dynamic changes in the shape of which being facilitated by small changes in the relative linear and angular orientation of the plates with each other as they proceed downwardly through the mold cavity.