CAST-DESIGNER FOR GRAVITY/SAND CASTING

CAST-DESIGNER for Gravity Casting can make the casting system design and fast simulation for sand casting, gravity die casting, low pressure die casting, investment casting , lost foam casting and centrifugal casting etc.

Cast-Designer is a quick casting design and analysis tool based on upfront design & analysis technology. The core of the “upfront design & analysis technology” is to allow engineers to conduct fluid flow, heat transfer and solidification analysis by the assistance of combination of expert system and CAE technology, it helps engineers to make a “Right” engineering decision in the early design stage of a project. Upfront design & analysis technology has already been becoming a very important role in main stream design process.

With Cast-Designer, users can optimize a casting design by detecting the part features with potential metal flow and solidification problems, evaluating riser and chill, gate system and pouring system design alternatives in the early design stage. Even a novice with limited experience in simulation can easily undertake the design in very short period of time. In other words, Cast-Designer can help the industry to achieve the target of 'Time to Market'.

Gravity Casting Simulation Work Flow

Cast Designer Simulation Results (Samples)

Air Entrapment

Filling

Solidification

Gate System Design Advisor Cast-Designer is an expert system, with KBE technology. It summarized half century knowledge, and experience of casting process, and provided complete guide line, to help designer. The gating system advisor, is one of the most useful wizards in Cast-Designer. With such advisor, the designer can get, the filling time, inner gate section area, based on the casting weight, or volume, and feature thickness of casting part. Then the user can adjust the numbers, and section area of gate runner, runner and sprue runner.

Gating System Design - STEP BY STEP

Riser and Feeder Design Embedded Riser and Feeder Module guides the user swiftly towards the optimized design of a feeding system. By this knowledge base build in Riser Calculator, it helps design to Select the correct riser size and shape Define the amount of risers Optimize riser necksize. The criteria of a successful gating system is it should prevent turbulence and cold-shut during filling process, and it could solve the air problems, mould erosion, oxides and surface defects in all gravity casting process.

Inner Gate and Runner Design Build in wizard to define flow path and section parameters quickly Generate feature sections in pre-defined curve or wire directly Section shape could be rectangle or circle Various styles in solid model generation Take account of the efficiency of metal flow in runner design Real time WYS/WYG visualization for both 2D and 3D Pouring system Design Support various types pouring system Full parameterized and standard design Easily to customize Real time WYS/WYG visualization for both 2D and 3D

CPI Analysis for Gravity / Sand Casting

OVERVIEW

Cast-Designer CPI (Casting Process Insight) is a powerful tool  to provide the detail metal flow, solidification and heat transfer information during casting process based on the last FEM technology. CPI is special designed for the conceptual stage for casting part and mould design, it is much more modest in its capabilities than tradition numerical simulation.

With Cast-Designer CPI, the user can detect part features with potential filling and solidification problems, evaluate casting system design alternatives. The user does not have to be an expert in simulation to use CPI and the time required for evaluating a die casting design is remarkably quick. In other word, CPI can be used by any die caster, tool maker, or part designer with access to a computer.

BENEFITS TO USER

CPI is the sole really practical tool on the marketing today to support designer and engineer to make fast decision for casting part and mould design.

• Analysis the part thickness to guide the mould and cooling channel design and placement.
• Innovation technology with high accuracy and no limitation compared with tradition method
• Provide fast virtual result
• Start from CAD part Integrated CAD, design and analysis in a same  environment, setup an analysis model in a few minuets and a few clicks
• No requirement for any CAE knowledge, very short learning curve

BEST-IN-CLASS

It is well known the traditional numerical simulation is not applicable or very expensive for the concept stage. The data to run a numerical simulation is usually not available yet, for example runner geometry. Due to the complexity of the equation system to be solved, numerical simulation is too time consuming, usually hours or even days. Setup the simulation model is also a heavy job. Numerical simulation provides a relatively high level accuracy, which is more than needed at conceptual design stage.

Solver Technology

• Base on Finite Element Method (FEM) technology
• Fluid flow calculations are described by the full Navier-Stokes equation and couple to thermal analysis
• Simulate the physical phenomena and mechanical behavior of metal filling, solidification and cooling process, such as temperature, velocity, pressure, liquid/solid factors etc.
• Innovation technology to speed up simulation
• Submit job to solver in directly and batch queue mode
• Both 32 bits and 64 bits solvers, Windows and Linux
• Support parallel computing technology for big or huge model

Excellent Mesh Technology

• Very fast and robust meshing, fully automatically
• Flexible to control the element size in different direction (X/Y/Z)
• Support multi solid geometries, no Boolean operation required before meshing
• CAD or mesh or mixed CAD & mesh as original data
• Special treatment for CAD defects, such as geometry gap, overlay, intersection or unclose
• Advance technology for tin dimension or complex region
• Advance mesh smoothing technology to match the geometry feature

Model Setup

• Single page to setup casting process, boundary condition and control parameters for flow, heat transfer and solidification simulation
• With rich material data in database, casting and mould material could be selected from database directly
• Pre-defined template for casting process, as well as user can define the process in free, such as filling rate, pressure, mould size and HTC etc.
• All conditions and parameters could be save as template file for future usage

Result & Reporting

• Introduce special customized ParaVIEW as post-processors. ParaVIEW is a famous software and used widely in HPC, it is very powerful and flexible
• Rich analysis results in various formats, such as contours, vectors, sections and curves, it is also support animation and VRML
• Support plug-in filter for post-process, similar the concept of Photoshop