Abstract
New and more complex casting technologies are growing, and foundries are using innovative methods to reduce cost and energy consumption and improve their product qualities. Numerical techniques, as tools to design and examine the process improvements, are also evolving continuously to embrace modelling of more dynamic systems for industrial applications. This paper will present a fresh approach towards the numerical simulation of dynamic processes using an evolving and dynamic mesh technique. While the conventional numerical techniques have been employed for these dynamic processes using a fixed domain approach, the more realistic evolving approach is used herein to match the complex material processes in new foundries. The underpinning of this new dynamic approach is highlighted by an evolving simulation environment where multiple mesh entities are appended to the existing numerical domain at timesteps. Furthermore, the change of the boundary and energy sources within casting process simulations have rationally been presented and its profound effects on the computational time and resources have been examined. The discretization and solver computational features of the technique are presented and the evolution of the casting domain (including its material and energy contents) during the process is described for semi-continuous casting process applications.
Highlights
One of the main interests of new foundries is to have reliable and optimised material processes where final quality of products, their lower costs and higher production rates are guaranteed
There are some other techniques which have been developed for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and free and dynamic boundary problems [15,16,17] to account for domain evolution and melt flow
The dynamic technique can be employed for the simulation of foundry processes with transient growing domains
Summary
One of the main interests of new foundries is to have reliable and optimised material processes where final quality of products, their lower costs and higher production rates are guaranteed. The mainstream methodologies within popular foundry process software are either; to represent growing casting domains using an initially deactivated mesh with continuous element activation (at time steps) or; by generating new element layers at physical boundaries by splitting elements [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. There are some other techniques which have been developed for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and free and dynamic boundary problems [15,16,17] to account for domain evolution and melt flow These methods are either computationally expensive due to large size matrices for practical casting applications or computationally difficult to employ within popular mainstream industrial casting software tools. The main attractive features of this new technique are that it can treat the growing casting domain with insertion of new element blocks (i.e., starting with small system matrices like inactive element method), while agile enough to be implemented into mainstream industrial software (in this case LS-DYNA® solver version R10.1.0 by LSTC, Ansys Inc, Canonsburg, PA, USA)
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