Numerical simulation of mould filling process for pressure plate and valve handle in LFC

In lost foam casting (LFC),the distribution of polymer beads during the bead filling process is not uniform,and the collision between polymer beads determines the distribution of two-phase flow of gas and solid.The interaction between the gas and solid phases reveals as coupling effect of the force that gas exerts on particles or vice versa,or that among particles.The gas-solid flow in filling process is nonlinearity,which makes the coupling effect an essential point to carry out a simulation properly.Therefore,information of each particle's motion is important for acquiring the law of filling process.In bead filling process,compressed air is pressed into mold cavity,and discharged from gas vent,creating a pressure difference between outer and inner space near the gas vent.This pressure difference directly changes the spatial distribution and motion trace of gas and solid phases.In this paper,Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are employed to simulate the fluid dynamic character based on Newton's Third Law of Motion.The simulation results of some casting products such as pressure plate and valve handle are compared with the result obtained from practical experiment in order to test the feasibility of DEM.The comparison shows that this DEM method can be a very promising tool in the mould filling simulation of beads' movement.