During the continuous casting of steel, several disturbances occur and affect all the parts of the caster, including the mould where the molten steel has to be stable for good quality of the final product. Especially at high casting velocities, the bulging generates important level fluctuations which cannot be efficiently rejected by the classical controllers. To address these problems, this paper proposes an architecture combining disturbances estimation and compensation techniques. It operates as an additional module and does not need any change of the main controller currently implemented. The entire structure has been tested successfully through several simulations and by means of intensive water model experiments. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.