Electromagnetic Wiping System for Hot-Dip Coating

Galvanizing is the process of applying a zinc coating to iron and steel to prevent corrosion. Hot-dip galvanizing, electrogalvanizing, and zinc spraying are three of the most used methods for adding zinc to iron and steel. The continuous sheet hot-dip technique is used to coat the majority of galvanized products Jet wiping is a process of hot-dip galvanization and is used to regulate the thickness of a liquid coat on a moving substrate by wiping the free surface. Nevertheless, some undulation phenomena occur over the zinc film due to the jet wiping action; among different actuators used to cope with this issue, the electromagnetic (EM) control system seems a viable solution. Hence, a reduced-order a model capable of accounting for magnetohydrodynamic effects has been elaborated at von Karman Institute. The project presented in this thesis has been part of the validation campaign of the numerical results of the electromagnetic model mentioned above and it has been undertaken in Elmer. This freeware software has been developed by the Finnish IT centre for science (CSC) and it is based on the finite element method (FEM). Elmer has offered an appealing opportunity being a multiphysics software, user-friendly thanks to its Graphical User Interface (GUI) version and easy to learn as CFD tool. The numerical results obtained by the simulations in Elmer have demonstrated the accuracy of the EM model both without and with a magnetic field.