3. Special features

3.1 Casting speeds

• To be competitive, continuous casting of thin slabs requires relatively high speeds to compensate for the slab's low linear mass. From the outset, we have sought to maintain a metal flow per line comparable to that obtained with traditional continuous casting of thick slabs.

  In traditional continuous casting, the average casting speed is 1.50 m/min for a 200 mm thick slab and 1.2 m/min for a 250 mm thick slab. Depending on the process, thin slabs can be cast at the speeds shown in table 3 .

  We can see that the speeds actually achieved on thin-slab continuous casters are still slightly lower than the speeds required to obtain the same...