Experimental and Numerical Analysis Applied on Steel Bars Cooling

Abstract

AISI 1020 steel bars cooling have been investigated aiming to obtain their cooling rate during heat treatment. Hot steel bars just taken out of the furnace are piled over other ones that were taken out of the furnace earlier. A mathematical model has been created and implemented using the software EES, Engineering Equation Solver. An experiment was conducted to validate the mathematical model. The experiment consists in three loads of three bars each with a time interval of 5 minutes between them. The initial temperature of each bar was 150oC. The mathematical model can obtain the thermal profile of each bar and the average and maximum deviation when confronted with experimental data were about 8% and 20% respectively.

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of Steel Bars Cooling by Free Convection and Thermal Radiation

“…The average difference between simulations and experiments is in a range from -0.3ºC to 3.5ºC. These results represent a great increase in accuracy when compared to [6], where the average difference were between 3% and 13% of the temperature values which represents 3.8 ºC to 16.5 ºCand compared with [5] which had average temperature differences between 4.1 ºC and 14.9ºC.One can see in the figures that when a new row of bars enters the experiment the temperature of the lower row increases, a situation that was better described by the CFD model then in the previous works.The simulation follows the experimental data very closely for all bars during all times.…”

“…The authors analyzed the same problem in the past [5,6], but without using CFD and with less accurate results. In the previous articles, researchers used a different numerical method with a time marching solution based on literature experimental correlations for natural convection and radiation.…”