Modeling of Injection Casting Process

This firm has experts in injection casting processes. Any number of materials can be cast into a mold to form a product to be sold commercially or used in an industrial application. These materials would include plastics, aluminum, steel alloys, or any number of other molten alloys. Designers can often design the mold and specify process parameters (mold temperature, melt temperature, etc.) in order to insure proper filling of the mold to produce good quality material properties. The demands placed on the mold designer and production facilities leads to more complex shapes and better control or understanding of process parameters. These issues can often be addressed through the use of computational models in the design stages.

The physics associated with the injection casting process includes heat transfer, solidification, fluid flow, preheating of the mold, and the rate at which the molten material flows into the mold (location of molten metal surface).

One particular application is the high speed injection of a molten material into a quartz mold to form a fuel pin for a nuclear reactor. This is a very specialized application, but the physics are the same as used in many industrial applications.

Figure 1 - Cylindrical geometry for the injection casting of a uranium plutonium fuel pin.

A commercially available finite element CFD package was used for the analysis of the free surface flow and solidification into the mold shown above. Any general or complex geometry can be analyzed through the use of the finite element technique. It is the types of numerical techniques and available experimental data that are used, which determines the accuracy of the solution.

Figure 2 - Velocity vectors as molten metal enters and fills the mold

Figure 3 - Temperature contours for the molten metal as it enters and fills the mold. Note the rapid cooling of the metal as it flows down the length of the mold.

Figure 2 shows the velocity profile of the fluid as it enters and fills the mold. Figure 3 shows the cooling of the molten material as it flows into the mold. The free surface of the melt is shown and it moves through the finite element mesh being used to model the system.

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