Improvement of center segregation in high-carbon steel billets using soft reduction

Center segregation is the main reason for cup fracture of high-carbon wire rod during drawing. Therefore, to continuously produce cast billets with very low center segregation is an important objective. The soft reduction technology is considered to be an effective method to minimize center segregation. To elucidate the effect of soft reduction on the internal quality of high-carbon steel billets, soft reduction was applied with different solid fractions in the core area of billets in a laboratory casting machine. A coupled temperature/displacement finite element model was developed to calculate the solid fraction using the commercial software ABAQUS. Center segregation, center porosity, homogeneity of elements, and equiaxed crystal zone were obviously improved by applying soft reduction, especially when the solid fraction was less than 1.0. The optimal results were obtained when the solid fraction was approximately 0.9.