Continuous casting technology can directly prepare the wire rod, which can eliminate rolling or extrusion and its pre- and post-processes, shorten the production process, reduce production equipment and sites, speed up the production cycle, and reduce investment and production costs.
Traditionally, wire rods are made of metal, and they are often divided into two steps to make ingots and then wire rods. There are many ways to make wire rods from ingots. The free forging process was used earlier to draw the ingots. After the rolling process appeared, forging was gradually eliminated, and pass rolling became the mainstream of manufacturing wire rods. The continuous casting and rolling process production line rod, because the casting waste heat is used for rolling, can save the energy for reheating. Now it has been developed and used by leaps and bounds, and is especially suitable for large-scale, single-variety and specification wire rod production; and for grades wire rods with many varieties and small batches, the extrusion method is mostly used.
However, there are still many problems with continuous casting technology of wire rods. For example, the solidification characteristics of continuous casting determine that the central area of the ingot must have defects such as shrinkage, porosity, segregation, and inclusions.
Except for a small number of inclusions in aluminum ingots, which are brought in by production equipment and processes, aluminum is mainly combined with oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur in the molten state to form oxides, nitrides, carbides, and Non-metallic inclusions such as sulfide and oxide film. Therefore, in the process of melting and casting, if the dissolved gas and non-metallic inclusions in the liquid aluminum are treated improperly, metallurgical defects such as looseness, inclusions, and pores will be caused in the aluminum ingot. The use of flux refining, online degassing system, and CFF filtering technology can also improve the removal of the gas contained in the aluminum ingot raw material. Through these measures, the content of non-metallic inclusions such as gas, oxide in the aluminum rod can be controlled to a very low range.
