Numerical methods to improve the computational efficiency of solidification simulation for the investment casting process

Abstract

Temperature distributions in investment castings and shells are of great influence on the quality of investment castings, many efforts have been made in the numerical simulation of heat transfer in the investment casting process. To improve the computational efficiency of solidification simulation of the investment casting process, the component-wise splitting methods and the irregular mesh technique were employed, a numerical simulation of 3D temperature field of investment castings was developed and eight practical investment castings were simulated with focus on the computational efficiency. It successfully solves the problem of low computational efficiency resulting from the explicit finite difference method and complicated calculation of full-implicit difference algorithm.