Solidification is an important process governing the quality of metallurgical products, but the study of solidification process under continuous casting condition is extremely difficult result from the high temperature, opaque, large-scale and continuous production. The current research methods mainly include numerical simulation, physical simulation and thermal simulation, among which thermal simulation method is of great interest because the experimental data similar to the production conditions can be directly obtained. This work systematically introduces the methods of thermal simulation for continuous casting solidification. The principles of thermal simulation techniques are briefly described, and the applications of the mold thermal simulation method and the characteristic unit thermal simulation method are summarized. Among them, the thermal simulation methods for dendritic growth of continuous casting billet and hot tearing based on the heat conduction similarity have successfully "condensed" the solidification process of a dozen tons of cast billet into a laboratory study with 100 grams of steel. Both the methods can not only reveal the influences of composition, pouring and cooling conditions on solidification process, microstructure and solute distribution, but also can observe the morphology of solid-liquid interface, diffusion of solute, evolution of inclusions, and the possibility of hot tearing formation, that are regarded as extremely important issues in metallurgy filed but cannot be obtained by other means.