On Numerical Simulation of Casting in New Foundries: Dynamic Process Simulations

Abstract

<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

Dynamic Simulations of Manufacturing Processes: Hybrid-Evolving Technique

“…It can also be clearly seen how the billet length and the parallelization influence the computational efficiency where DMT can benefit more from heavy parallelization than BT. Only in the case of 64 cores and only for the short billet length of 0.5 m, BT can slightly beat DMT using 16 cores [4]. Furthermore, Figure 3c shows the increase in IO processing times for DMT at each restart point (for 1.4 m length billet) using different numbers of computational nodes (1, 2, and 4 number of nodes).…”

“…For dynamic systems, it is essential to have a strategy to evolve the numerical domain according to the real pace of the manufacturing process which ultimately delivers a dynamic and growing computational domain. The proposed DMT technique can deliver a method where accurate results can be obtained using growing and evolving domains [4,9,11]. The computational resources for this technique are commissioned gradually as the size of the real billet and its simulated counterpart are growing during the process.…”

“…While both techniques have employed contact elements to simulate the cooling boundaries (air and water cooling), for BT, the contacts had to be set up for the full length of the billet. Alternatively, for DMT, as new mesh layers are generated and attached to the main domain at solver restarts, contact setups needed to be updated [4,9,11].…”

“…To establish this integrated simulation framework, reliable interfacing and coupling procedures are required to implement the multi-solver scheme which is a pillar of the proposed Through Process Simulations (TPS) of materials which might include casting process to the forming of final parts [1]. To help establish a ground for such an integrated simulation framework, new and innovative hybrid techniques have widely been proposed [2][3][4], which help to improve analytical and numerical aspects of simulations. These upgraded and sophisticated analytical and numerical simulations are founded on hybrid physical-data-driven schemes where data processing and handling techniques are used to improve the analytical and numerical modeling.…”

Performance of Optimization Algorithms in the Model Fitting of the Multi-Scale Numerical Simulation of Ductile Iron Solidification

“…Today, numerical simulation of metal casting processes at macro scale is a well-known technology. Although new approaches based for example in dynamic mesh techniques are being currently investigated [1], the use of commercial programs based on the finite element method (FEM) or on the finite volume method (FVM) is quite widespread in the industry. However, the agreement between the obtained predictions and the actual results obtained at the foundry plant, is not always the desired one.…”