NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF DIECASTING OF AUTOMOTIVE COMPONENTS

A new and powerful tool is growing its relevance in the field of casting process design: the numerical simulation. The possibility of describing an industrial diecasting process by means of computational codes, well before of its experimental set up, gives fundamental information and support to the foundry engineer in designing the correct gating and feeding systems, in predicting the final quality of the casting, in improving the die life. An industrial application of this approach is presented in this paper, in which the MAGMASOFT code is employed for describing the fluid-dynamics and thermal fields induced in diecasting of an automotive transmission case. The outputs of numerical simulation, whose reliability have been checked by means of microstructural investigations, have been used for setting up the industrial process, which is currently running.