Thermo-fluid simulation using particle method based on hand-pouring motion in casting process

Abstract

Casting simulators are widely used to evaluate casting designs. However, most simulators using conventional methods such as FDM or FEM entail difficulty in evaluating casting designs sufficiently based on ladle motions or an operator’s pouring motion because they do not readily accommodate dynamically changing wall boundaries and do not easily accommodate the ladle motion as input. For this study, the authors extended the thermo-fluid simulation based on particle method, an earlier proposed method, so that the measured ladle motion can be input. The authors measured an operator’s ladle motion using marker tracking technique for AR and executed thermo-fluid simulations using the proposed simulation method. Comparisons of the experiments and the simulation results clarified that the proposed method can accurately predict flow behaviors of the molten metal resulting from the ladle motion. Comparisons of the proposed simulation and the simulation with a conventional simulation using the inflow condition of the constant flow rate clarified the importance of executing the simulation based on the ladle motion for high-accuracy prediction of molten metal behavior.