Effect of staggered arrays on cooling characteristics of impinging water jet on a hot steel plate

Abstract

Water impinging jet has been widely used in cooling of hot steel plate at steelmaking processes. The effects
of staggered arrays on water impinging jet cooling were mainly investigated at fixed jet Reynolds number of
35,000 and nozzle-to-plate distance of 100 mm. The time-and space-resolved heat flux was experimentally
measured with different staggered geometric array configurations which are considered to 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D, 8D,
and 10D, respectively. The heat flux were measured by a novel experimental technique that has a function of
high-temperature heat flux gauge in which is used to measure the heat flux distributions on the hot surface. The
qualitative flow visualization showed complex behavior for staggered array configuration, which exhibits a radial
flow interaction issuing from adjacent nozzles. The results show that the maximum area-averaged heat flux was
observed at S/D = 4. This was caused by the radial interaction between adjacent jets which affects different
boiling heat transfer on a hot steel plate. In this study, the measured heat flux curves are also provided to a
benchmark data for designing a new type of accelerated cooling equipment for plate mill.