A study on cooling characteristics of tire mold during a manufacturing process of Al-Mg system alloy casting mold

This paper reports the cooling characteristics of Al-Mg system alloy mold used as a mold material for manufacturing automobile tire during the solidification process inside the mold. In this study, the AC7A type, one of Al-Mg system alloy, which is selected because it is usually used at the manufacturing industry associated with metal casting with analysis model being also selected for the real manufacturing device. Experimental study is performed that AC7A aluminium alloy ingot is heated until 680 degrees C in smelting furnace. And it is injected inside the metal casting device after melting process is complete. Temperature distribution in the mold is measured using K-type thermocouples and is obtained by data acquisition unit from the initial state to about 20 min during the solidification process. Also, numerical analysis applying a finite element method (FEM) is used to calculate the temperature distribution at the same condition of experimental study in order to verify the propriety of numerical result. And then, from the numerical result, the cooling characteristics such as displacement and stress distributions of the inside mold can be predicted by the numerical analysis. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.