Melting, Remelting, and Casting for Clean Steel

The control of the metallurgy of steels is now highly developed. This is in contrast to the casting techniques for steels. Although continuous casting is generally conducted well, current ingot casting techniques are poor, unnecessarily introducing masses of oxides. For some steel compositions, double oxide films, bifilms, are entrained. This mechanism, occurring naturally during pouring, but till now generally overlooked, appears to be capable of explaining most of the features of steel defects in all their forms. For most Ni alloys and some steels it appears capable of generating a dense population of cracks, greatly impairing subsequent mechanical working and even final properties. In other steels the effects are much less severe. The techniques to avoid this damage to liquid steels and Ni alloys are described, including contact pouring, and naturally pressurized filling system designs. An ultimate system is counter gravity casting. For remelting processes, the risks of unreliability because of cracks intrinsic to VIM and VAR are discussed for both shop floor production and laboratory research. The potential crack-free properties of ESR when correctly made are recommended. Even so, remelting processes might constitute an unnecessary luxury if steels and Ni alloys were cast to avoid the entrainment of oxides.