EKK, Inc. Newsletter - March/April 2004
EKK participation in US-DOE project
Starting in May 2004, EKK will be participating in a 3 year US Department of Energy sponsored project titled "Development of Computational Tools for the Assurance of High Strength and Fatigue Resistant Aluminum Castings". General Motors will lead this project and will closely coordinate the project with Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oak Ridge National Lab, CompuTherm LLC, and EKK, Inc. Our contribution involves oxide inclusion prediction, using critical velocity and turbulence energy correlations.
Our annual user meeting is fast approaching, with a good turn out expected this year. May 13 is the date of this year's user meeting. On this date we invite our software users to visit us at our office in Walled Lake, Michigan to meet other users, share success stories, and make suggestions for future software improvements. The agenda has not been nailed down yet, but expect it to be similar to previous years where we discuss software enhancements in the morning and have technical discussions in the afternoon. As always, we are also making our team available to any user who wishes to stay an extra day (May 12 or May 14) 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.
Please let us know if you plan to attend by April 30, 2004.
See EKK at the 108th Metalcasting Congress
EKK will be exhibiting our software and consulting services at this year's combined AFS / NADCA 108th Metalcasting Congress in Rosemont, Illinois June 12-15th. As always, if you are interested in a free impromptu demonstration of our software, we encourage you to bring CAD of a design (preferably STL format) and we can create a mesh and perform a preliminary analysis while you wait! Come see us at booth 304.
Marty McLaughlin will be presenting the paper
Accurately Integrating Pressure Curves Into Flow Simulations For Low
Pressure Die Casting Analyses. The abstract for this paper is in
the aluminum division of the AFS
Session Schedule.
In addition, Dr. Kim will be participating in
a round robin session where he will discuss the "Effects of Heat
Transfer Coefficients on Permanent Mold Casting Solidification".
This session is scheduled in the Engineering division on Monday, June
14 at 8:30 am.
We recently bid farewell to Steve Elmore as he took a job with Boeing in Seattle (wacky aerospace engineers), but we are preparing to welcome to the EKK crew Matt Niedzwiecki, a new Co-op student from the University of Michigan. Matt will be joining us in early May, so send in those consulting RFQs!
The next release of KENT will have an enhanced ability to create a mesh of the casting geometry, using only the surrounding mold surfaces.
In the past users were forced to create the mesh and then manually sort through the "excess" elements in the mold cavity to define the casting and runner. This is a long, tedious process and often the mesh quality was not the best.
Modifications to KENT have now improved the mesh quality of these "excess" elements. Also, KENT will now automatically identify and reassign the largest "excess" body inside the mold, which is the casting and runner 99.9% of the time. This automatic function will save a lot of time and headaches.
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