EKK, Inc. Newsletter - 1st Quarter 2006

EKK, Inc. Newsletter - 1st Quarter 2006

EKK Presentations at the 2006 TMS Annual Meeting

If you are attending the 2006 TMS Annual Meeting next week in San Antonio Texas, be sure to check out our presentation A Porosity Simulation for High Pressure Die Casting (Authors: Chung-Whee Kim, Ken Siersma, and Kimio Kubo), which demonstrates how we have combined our traditional porosity model with trapped air modeling for application to HPDC. Gerald Backer will be presenting this paper on behalf of Dr. Kim and Ken Siersma, at 9:45 Wednesday morning.

Then at 10:25 that same morning, Gerald Backer will also be presenting his paper Computational Analysis of Oxide Inclusions in Aluminum Castings (Authors: Gerald P. Backer, Chung-Whee Kim, Ken Siersma, Qigui Wang), where he will describe techniques for simulation of the formation of oxides during filling of aluminum castings.

To view abstracts for these and all presentations at this years TMS meeting, click here and download the Technical Program PDF file of your choice - look on pg. 281 of the 'Final Program' for our abstracts.

Special note for EKK customers: Registered users can login to the protected area of our website and download the A Porosity Simulation for High Pressure Die Casting paper and presentation through our customer support page.

EKK at the 110th AFS/NADCA Metalcasting Congress

EKK will be exhibiting our sofware and consulting services at the 110th Metalcasting Congress April 18-21, 2006 in Columbus Ohio. Be sure to stop by booth 413 with CAD of a design in STL format so we can create a mesh and perform a preliminary analysis while you wait.

Also, Dr. Kim will be presenting the paper Improvement of Casting Simulation Efficiency by Mesh Coarsening (Authors: Chung-Whee Kim and Ken Siersma) at 3:45 PM on Thursday April 20th. This presentation will demonstrate our use of variable mesh density to decrease the mesh size for analysis. Click here to view the abstract - look under the DIE CASTING heading for Thursday at 3:45 PM for our abstract.

Special note for EKK customers: Registered users can login to the protected area of our website and download the Improvement of Casting Simulation Efficiency by Mesh Coarsening paper and presentation through our customer support page.

User Meeting - June 6, 2006

We have chosen June 6 as the date for this year's user meeting. On this date we invite our software users to visit us at our office in Farmington Hills, Michigan to meet other users, share success stories, and make suggestions for future software improvements. We will also make our team available to any user who wishes to stay an extra day (June 5 or June 7) for one-to-one troubleshooting. We look forward to this opportunity to get together with a majority of our users to discuss our software services.

New addition to EKK

This past January we hired David May as a Co-Op Student. David is currently an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, studying Mechanical Engineering. We've been breaking him in over these past couple months and now that he's up to speed with using our software we encourage you to send us your RFQs for simulation of that current hot project you're working on.

Did You Know?

Our fluid flow solver WRAFTS can use two different calculation integration schemes for modeling filling in casting processes - implicit or explicit integration. If you've wondered what the pros and cons of these integration schemes are, here's your answer:

Implicit integration is the most common method used when running a WRAFTS simulation. This is due to the fact that the implicit method tends to converge efficiently and is less sensitive to defects in a model's mesh. The implicit method has the ability to prevent the perpetuation of error throughout a simulation due to these mesh defects, i.e., if the simulation is not able to converge at some point during the analysis, the error that is generated will remain localized in that region of the model and will not impact the results in other regions.
Explicit integration is inherently more sensitive to mesh geometry, as it cannot prevent the perpetuation of error. This sensitivity to the mesh can result in the analysis to stop prematurely if the elements in the mesh are highly distorted and/or non-uniform. However, if an explicit simulation is able to run through completion, confidence can be taken in the accuracy of the solution.

Ultimately it is a judgement call for the user when choosing which solution method to use. In general the implicit solver is the best choice.

Previous newsletters

November/December 2005
September/October 2005
May/June/July/August 2005
March/April 2005
January/February 2005

Past newsletters