A Study on Solidification Characteristics of Aluminum Alloy Casting Material by Pre-heated Temperature Conditions

In this study, the solidification characteristics inside the AC7A casting material was analyzed using the numerical analysis method and was verified using the experimental method by the pre-heated temperature conditions of metal casting device. For the numerical analysis, "COMSOL Multiphysics", the commercial code based on the finite element analysis(FEA), was used in order to predict the thermal deformation of the AC7A casting material including temperature, displacement and stress distribution. Also, in order to verify the results calculated by the numerical analysis, the experiment for temperature measurement inside the AC7A casting material was performed using the K-type thermocouple under the same condition of numerical analysis method. In the numerical results, thermal deformation inside AC7A casting material was well-suited for manufacturing products when the pre-heated temperatures of the metal casting device was . When the results of the temperature distribution were experimentally measured and were compared with those of the numerical result, it appeared that there was some temperature difference because of the latent heat by phase change heat transfer. However, the result of cooling temperature and patterns were almost similar except for the latent heat interval. The solidification characteristics was closely related to the temperature difference between the surface and inside of the casting.