Development of integrated computer simulation system for casting design

An integrated computer simulation system has been developed for the design of actual industrial castings. The system includes a preprocessor, a mold filling simulator, a solidification simulator and a postprocessor. It is housed on an IBM compatible personal operating system. The interfaces between the preprocessor, the mold filling simulator, the solidification simulator and the postprocessor are also developed and integrated in the system. The developed system can be applied to various casting alloys and mold materials, as well as various casting processes such as sand casting, die casting, low-pressure casting and a number of other casting processes. The simulators can simulate the physical phenomena of mold filling using the SOLA-MAC(1) technique, and the subsequent solidification using the heat transfer principles and the effective specific method for the latent heat released. Mold filling-related casting defects, such as gas entrapment, can be directly predicted, and solidification-related casting defects, such as shrinkage porosity, can be easily predicted, because the defect criteria for the particular casting alloy under consideration is determined. The postprocessor is to display the results of the simulations, such as filling pattern, velocity profile, temperature distribution and air entrapment condition, using vector plots, as well as color contour plots. The preprocessor and the postprocessor are developed using the Visual-Basics and C++ languages, and the simulators are using the Watcom-Fortran language. The system developed is then tested on a gear pump casting made by the diecasting process, to demonstrate what the simulation system can do and how it is to be used.