Abstract: A method that determines a fill level height (h1) of a metal melt in a mould of a continuous casting machine with a virtual fill level sensor, wherein the metal melt in the mould forms a mould level with the fill level height (h1), and to a virtual fill level sensor suitable therefor. The problem addressed by the method is finding a way to determine the fill level in the mould of the continuous casting machine, so that the start and the end of casting can be carried out fully automatically and without using a radiometric sensor.

Abstract: A method that includes casting liquid metal in the mould of the strand casting system, extracting a metal strand from the mould using rollers of the strand guide of the strand casting system, determining a measurement variable, which correlates to the fluctuation of the casting level in the mould, cyclically changing the spacing of the opposing rollers of the strand guide in directions opposite to the fluctuations of the casting level to reduce fluctuations of the casting level, and detecting casting level fluctuation frequencies and providing at least one observer, which determines the actual value (ACT) of the roller spacing being used as one of the input variables for the observer in order to compensate a phase shift and/or amplitude of the actual value (ACT) of the roller spacing.