Solution of non-linear thermal transient problems by a new adaptive time-step method in quenching process

Quenching process is a thermo-elastic-plasticity problem with a high material non-linearity. The numerical oscillation is likely caused in the simulation of quenching process. In order to avoid the numerical oscillation and improve the calculation accuracy of temperature and phase-transformation fields in the quenching process, a new self-adaptive time-step size method is presented. The method can adjust the time-step size according to the maximum and minimum differences of temperature fields between the previous simulation step and the current simulation step. FEM software for evaluating the temperature, stress/strain and phase-transformation is also developed. A cooling example with numerical analytical results and a quenching example with experiment results are used to verify the calculation accuracy of this software. Five methods including the method in this paper, two constant time-step sizes and two geometric proportion time-step sizes are applied to simulate the quenching process of a 40Cr steel cylinder, respectively. A comparison of the simulation results shows that, the method presented in this paper can effectively avoid the numerical oscillation, ensure the calculation accuracy and cost less calculation time. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.