Simulation of water flows in multiple columns with small outlets

Abstract

High-pressure die casting such as thixocasting and rheocasting is an effective process in the manufacturing automotive parts. Following the recent trend in the automotive manufacturing technologies, the product design subject to the die casting becomes more and more complex. Simultaneously the injection speed is also designed to be very high to establish a short cycletime. Thus, the requirement of the die design becomes more demanding than ever before. In some cases the product’s shape can have multiple slender manifolds. In such cases, design of the inlet and outlet parts of the die is very important in the whole manufacturing process. The main issues required for the qualified products are to attain gentle and uniform flow of the molten liquid within the passages of the die. To satisfy such issues, the inlet cylinder (‘bed cylinder’ in this paper) must be as large as possible and simultaneously the outlet opening at the end of each passage must be as small as possible. However these in turn obviously bring additional manufacturing costs caused by re-melting of the bed cylinder and increased power due to the small outlet-openings. The purpose of this paper is to develop effective simulation methods of calculation for fluid flows in multiple columns, which mimic the actual complex design, and to get some useful information which can give some contributions to the die-casting industry. We have used a commercial code CFX in the numerical simulation. The primary parameter involved is the size of the bed cylinder. We will show how the very small opening of the outlet can be treated with the aid of the porous model provided in the code. To check the validity of the numerical results we have also conducted a simple experiment by using water.