Virtual Mold Technique in Thermal Stress Analysis during Casting Process

It is important to analyse the casting product and the mold at the same time considering thermal contraction of the casting and thermal expansion of the mold. The analysis considering contact of the casting and the mold induces the precise prediction of stress distribution and the defect such as hot tearing. But it is difficult to generate FEM mesh for the interface of the casting and the mold. Moreover the mesh for the mold domain spends lots of computational time and memory for the analysis due to a number of meshes. Consequently we proposed the virtual mold technique which only uses mesh of the casting part for thermal stress analysis in casting process. The spring bar element in virtual mold technique is used to consider the contact of the casting and the mold. In general, a volume of the mold is much bigger than that of casting part, so the proposed technique decreases the number of mesh and saves the computational memory and time greatly. In this study, the proposed technique was verified by the comparison with the traditional contact technique on a specimen. And the proposed technique gave satisfactory results.