EKK, Inc. Newsletter - September/October 2004
Did you see our recent article in the September 2004 issue of Die Casting Engineer, detailing our recent work on improving quality control in magnesium castings, with an emphasis on predicting porosity defects by modeling trapped air during filling? The paper is titled An Application of Trapped-Air Analysis to Large, Complex High-Pressure Magnesium Casting, and you can view the abstract here. Upon request, we can send you a hard copy from our limited supply.
MESHID Thermal Analysis Setup Updates
The thermal analysis setup tool in MESHID has been recently enhanced to include the ability to read in the input file for the CAPCAST cyclic thermal analysis software, also known as the BAT file. This new functionality allows for minor modifications to easily be made to a BAT file that was previously created with MESHID (due to a change in the BAT file format) without having to go through the BAT file by hand. Interested? Let us know, and we will get you started reading in BAT files!
Basic HPDC Software Package Now Available
We have begun marketing a special sofware package that caters specifically to the needs of high pressure die casters. This package includes only the functionality that most HPDC analyses require, with a big savings from our typical software package. Find out more here.
EKK Software Installed at WPI's Metal Processing Institute
We've recently supplied the Advanced Casting Research Center division of the Metal Processing Institute at Worcester Polytechnic Institute with an academic license of our CAPCAST software package. We are pleased that our software will be used at this highly respected institution, and look forward to working with them.
An important step in model verification that is often overlooked is running a natural solidification analysis. This type of analysis involves just surrounding the casting cavity with a big block representing the mold (which the CAPCAST mesh generator does for you automatically), and allowing the liquid metal to solidify. This type of analysis will run in minutes, and it can reveal hard to identify mesh quality problems. To be specific, if the CAPCAST thermal analysis software has a difficult time solving this type of simulation, then there is a problem with the finite element mesh, and you should not proceed with more detailed analyses until the mesh problems are corrected.
We feel this is an important step to take when building a mesh, but we know that many of our users do not run a natural solidification analysis, most likely because of the time involved in setting up the analysis. We now offer an automatic SOL file generation tool that will generate a suitable SOL file for a natural solidification analysis with minimal input from the user. Let us know if you'd like to try it out.
Did you ever want to graphically visualize the output of a fluid flow analysis summary file?, If so, you can use the 'wsum' tool. Wsum will import the summary file and allow you to plot against time such variables as volume, velocity, calculation timestep, and iterations. This tool is useful in quickly checking if your shot profile is being appropriately modeled, and if the cavity is filling as expected, for example. Try it today!
Previous newsletters