HIGH PRESSURE DIE CASTING SIMULATION OF ALUMINUM MOUNTING FRAME FOR RECESSED LIGHTING

Abstract

High pressure die (HPD) casting is a wildly used practice in industry, especially when it comes to casting metals such as aluminum, copper or bronze and their alloys. This paper discussed how variation of piston speed and pressure influence casting errors such as shrinking. Using simulations for determining how processing parameters effect the final casting product has been a more popular since it is made to save money, resources and energy. The program used to simulate HPD casting is NOVACAST^TM which uses finite volume elements for calculation both metal flow and solidification. The model for simulation uses 500000 elements, with about 15mm of distance casting and the wall of the mold for the calculation box. The casting temperature of EN AC-46000 (SS4250) alloy is 685 ºC. There are two cooling channels one on each side of the casting inside the mold that use water as a coolant at 30 ºC. The heat transfer model used is Surface heat transfer while for Shrinkage calculation High gravity influence is taken in account. For HPD with filling chamber parameters the Chamber diameter is 80 mm Chamber length is 345 mm (5 mm are given to the model for more precise gating placement), melt mass in chamber 3.5 kg and Metal filled into casting cavity is 2.933 kg. The varying parameters are Piston velocity and Flow. Unfortunately the current model for the casting had critical shrinkage regardless of the varying parameters therefore the simulation must be further improved to correspond to the real life results.