VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING AND SIMULATION OF METAL CASTING PROCESSES

This thesis investigates the development of a FEM model for aluminum casting virtual manufacturing. These kinds of simulations are employed in the industries to develop an optimal mold geometry to reduce manufacturing-induced defects in the final piece. manufacturing process simulation allows to speed up time to market and reduce cost related to testing requiring suitable facilities and a test for each design change. FEM simulation allows the user to go through the heuristic phase much quicker with a significant cost saving. Several commercial software performing casting simulations such as InspireCast are available, but they don’t disclose the computational methodology to obtain results and few parameters are tunable. This work is focused on developing a model within the FEM commercial software Abaqus framework for aluminum gravity casting by optimizing various simulation parameters. The FEM method is used to solve the problem with Eulerian and CEL ( Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian) formulation. The developed FEM model was assessed and validated against InspireCast results.