China Foundry (Nov 2008)
Based on database and asp.net technologies, a web platform of scientific data in the casting forces on the mold-fi lling behavior of titanium melts in vertically rotating molds
Abstract
The vertical centrifugal-casting technique is widely used in the manufacture of various irregularlyshaped castings of advanced structural alloys with thin walls, complex shapes and/or large sizes. These castings are used in the increasing applications in aero-space/aviation industries, human teeth/bone repairs with nearnet shaped components, etc. In a vertically rotating casting system, the mold-filling processes of alloy melts, coupled with solidifi cation-heat transfer, may be much more complicated, because they are driven simultaneously by gravity, centrifugal and Coriolis forces. In the present work, an N-S/VOF-equations-based model, solved using a SOLA-VOF algorithm, under a rotating coordinate system was applied to numerically investigate the impacts of centrifugal and Coriolis forces on metallic melt mold-fi lling processes in different vertical centrifugal-casting configurations with different mold-rotation rates using an authors’ computer-codes system. The computational results show that the Coriolis force may cause remarkable variations in the fl ow patterns in the casting-part-cavities of a large horizontal-section area and directly connected to the sprue via a short ingate in a vertical centrifugalcasting process. A “turn-back” mold-filling technique, which only takes advantage of the centrifugal force in a transient rotating melt system, has been confi rmed to be a rational centrifugal-casting process in order to achieve smooth and layer-by-layer casting-cavities-fi lling control. The simulated mold-fi lling processes of Ti-6Al-4V alloy melt, in a vertical centrifugal-casting system with horizontally-connected plate-casting cavities, show reasonable agreement with experimental results from the literature.
