Experimental and numerical studies on the effects of heating frequency in the thixoforming process for the 2D aluminum alloy semi-solid state

This paper presents a study of frequency effects on the heating induction process for aluminum alloys. Our objectives are to deal with the more general induction heating issues in the semi-solid metal forming by taking into account the conditions of radiation and convection during the heating combined with cooling process at the surface of samples, hence the spatial-temporal variation of temperature on the whole sample volume. The Lab experiment for a cylinder aluminum alloy and numerical approaches for the physical model of a 2D heat transfer equation with the boundary conditions of convection and radiation were carried on. It is interesting to find that with a smaller rank of heating frequency 21–24KHz on the aluminum alloy, the distribution of the temperature is very homogenous on all samples from the center to surface areas, i.e. on the whole heated volume. We also observed that the quality of our samples after the induction heating process was very good and the ‘foot elephant’ pattern did not happen.