Análisis de Sensibilidad de Flujos de Aluminio en Moldes Permanentes al Tamaño de Malla y Coeficiente de Transferencia Termica

Published in: Engineering for a Smarter Planet: Innovation, ITC, and Computational Tools for Sustainable Development: Proceedings of the 9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology
Date of Conference: August 3-5, 2011
Location of Conference: Medellin, Colombia
Authors: Sandra Carolina Murcia S.
E. Alexander Ossa Henao
Marco A Paniagua
Refereed Paper: #274

Abstract

Casting processes are widely used in the production of metal components thanks to the ease of obtaining large volumes of parts with complex geometries and low production costs. That is why industry has been adopting the use of software that allows the simulation of filling and solidification processes of the parts. This process is often carried out at the foundry, which explains why these software’s are considered "user friendly", allowing a "drive thru" the simulation without using a strong criteria for evaluation such as the convergence of the results. This study presents the simulation and analysis of the filling of a permanent mold to produce aluminum tensile specimens using the commercial software SolidCast ®. Simulations showed mesh size related problems that occur with the use of three different processing temperatures. The software also showed great variability when the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) was varied using values found experimentally, from literature and theoretically calculated. It was found that while the temperature increases, there is a rise in the dependence of results to the mesh and the sensitivity to HTC chosen. This work defines the appropriate processing (temperature) and modeling (HTC and mesh size) parameters required to successfully fill permanent moulds with aluminum for the fabrication of tensile testing micro-specimens.