Comparison of approaches to the numerical modelling of pure metals solidification using the control volume method

Abstract

ABSTRACT The thermal processes proceeding in the casting-mould system are analysed. Solidification process can be described in the different ways. One of them consists in the application of the Fourier–Kirchhoff equation in which the source function controlling the phase change is introduced. In this paper, two approaches to the modelling of pure metals solidification, i.e. the solidification proceeding at the constant temperature and in the artificially introduced interval of temperature are considered. Numerical model used at the stage of computations is constructed using the Control Volume Method in which the principle of conservation of energy (taking also into account the release of latent heat of solidification) is applied to each control volume ensuring the correctness of the model. The use of Voronoi/Thiessen tessellation to the discretization of the casting-mould system can accurately reproduce the shape of each sub-domain. In the final part of the paper, the examples of computations are shown.