Numerical simulation of casting solidification in permanent metallic molds

Casting solidification is actually the transformation of liquid phase to solid phase with the liberation of latent heat of fusion. During this metallurgical process, it induces casting defects like shrinkage, porosity and hot tears. To eradicate and eliminate these problems, accurate casting design and proper design of gating system is necessary. This can be predicted and designed by means of computer simulation of casting solidification. This review paper discusses about the simulation process of casting solidification with the aid of an example, which will help the foundry engineers and industrial metallurgists to optimize the design parameters, better understand the temperature history of the solidifying casting and hence to identify the hot spot region with the aid of obtained time-temperature contours. These results will be used to get defect free as cast products on implementing the above findings attained from the simulation process. In this paper, the importance of heat transfer in the simulation process is presented. This paper reviews the details of computer simulation of solidification of castings in metallurgical engineering foundries. Since, computers became widely available in industry, researchers have been working on the development of programs to simulate the solidification of castings.