FE program development for predicting thermal deformation in heat treatment

The distortion or fracture of heat treated components is a major industrial problem, which may considerably increase the costs of operations and decrease the qualities of core parts. In heat treatment industrial fields, the methods used to control these undesirable effects have been necessarily empirical. Therefore, these problems could not be handled systematically and did not be studied quantitatively. To predict thermal deformation of final shape after heat treatment, many factors related to heat treatment process and thermal analysis must be considered. In the present study, the purpose is development of a FE program to predict and control thermal deformation. The program could analyze heat treatment process by calculating temperature, thermal stress and deformation value. The two-dimensional program based on finite element method has been developed and it is applied to actual heat treatment process. Actual heat treatment process (TD process) has been applied to predict thermal deformation by comparison of several experiment data and simulations.