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innovations CASTING


Engineers believed the ductile iron was eroding certain regions of the six-cavity die.


tify the root cause of the erosion to reengineer the existing design. T e baseline simulation showed metal pushing into the area of the erosion (Fig. 4) with a velocity that was quite turbulent, which indicated the same problem seen on the production fl oor. T e engineering team increased the center shaft diam-


eter and radius to slow the velocity around the problem area. T e simulation showed considerable decrease in fl uid velocity going up the shaft compared to the baseline model. T is led to less turbulence, and as a result, less fl uid pres- sure around the concerned region. T is lowered the chance of fl ash in the prob- lem region, which reduced potential die erosion. Fur- ther iterations were run to fi ne tune the fl ow balance, which could further reduce die erosion.


Once these design


changes were applied in production trials, the sam- ple runs showed promising signs of improvement. T e die erosion was signifi cantly less and the downtime to repair the die was reduced by 81.2%. “T e traditional ap-


The simulation showed metal pushing to the area where the die erosion was discovered.


proach of relying on experienced designers to defi ne the die based on what worked on similar projects in the past rarely produced a design that met our requirements,” Kre- itzer said. “So we had to run tests on the machine to work out the problems. Now, computer simula- tion makes it possible to evaluate the performance of the die prior to building


Nov/Dec 2014 | METAL CASTING DESIGN & PURCHASING | 47


hardware. We have found ProCAST predictions to be very accurate, and simulation provides more information than what is obtained during testing.” T e resulting visualization of the casting process helps engineers understand the causes of defects and evaluate the performance of modifi ed tooling designs without having to actually produce tooling. “As a result, we have been able to substantially reduce the number of die tries and compress the entire product development process by several months,” Kreizer said. 


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