Casting

 

Solution to foundry problems

With our casting solutions you can Get it Right the fi rst time and enhance your productivity & profi tability

ESI’s Casting Simulation Suite, ESI ProCAST , provides a complete set of solutions for the foundry industry. An advanced tool which is the result of more than 25 years of collaboration with major industrial partners and academic institutions across the world, ESI ProCAST offers an extensive suite of modules and foundry tools to meet today’s challenging industrial requirements. Based on the powerful Finite Element Technology, ESI ProCAST enables predictive evaluations of the entire casting process, including filling and solidification defects, mechanical properties and complex part distortion. It enables rapid visualization of effects of design changes and provides a basis for correct decisionmaking, from the earliest stages of the manufacturing process.

ESI ProCAST enables the modeling of all casting processes for all castable alloys, and also addresses other foundry relevant manufacturing process like core blowing & heat treatment.

 

Visual-Environment: A Streamlined and Productive Interface

ESI’s Casting Simulation Suite , ProCAST, is fully integrated with ESI’s open collaborative engineering environment, Visual-Environment, allowing for interoperability and chaining between casting software and other simulation disciplines. Within Visual-Environment you can find Visual-Mesh, Visual-CAST, Visual-Viewer and Visual-Process.

A Visual-Mesh comes with a CAD reader and specific tools to facilitate the link between CAD environment and meshing operations.

A Visual-CAST provides foundry tailored wizards and data checks which guide users to set-up their casting process. An extensive material database is available with standard and commonly used alloys, dies, chills, sand molds & cores, ceramics, filters, insulation & exothermic sleeves. In addition, it also features a unique thermodynamic material database calculator which allows the user to directly enter the chemical composition of the alloy and automatically predict temperaturedependent properties required to accurately simulate the casting process.

A Visual-Viewer is a complete, productive and innovative postprocessing environment for foundry applications with a state-of-theart plotting and animation control solution. It enables you to boost the productivity of your foundry engineers by performing automated tasks and generating customized reports within a multi page/window environment.

Originally created in 1985 by foundry professionals from Aluminum Pechiney, ESI’s QuikCAST is today fully integrated into ESI’s ProCAST and available in the Visual-Environment. ESI’s QuikCAST meets industrial needs delivering rapid and realistic predictions, allowing foundrymen the ability to simulate the entire casting process from fi lling to solidifi cation, including defects prediction.

A ProCAST Szoftvercsomag felépítése

Base Package

Graphical User Interface, Material Databases
Optimization Solvers & Die Design Tools complete the ProCAST suite and are all offered under one single graphical user interface, Visual- Environment, aided by standard & intuitive workflows.
Flow Solver
Visual-CAST provides an intuitive interface for users to setup their casting process. Hydraulic, thermal and contact conditions are defined on surfaces or volumes. A model can be completely remeshed without losing the model set-up. Properties and parameters can be retrieved from extensive databases describing:
Thermal Solver
Visual-CASTVisual-CAST provides foundry tailored wizards and data checks which guide users to set-up their casting process. An extensive material database is available with standard and commonly used alloys, dies, chills, sand molds & cores, ceramics, filters, insulation & exothermic sleeves. In addition, it also features a unique thermodynamic material database calculator which allows the user to directly enter the chemical composition of the alloy and automatically predict temperaturedependent properties required to accurately simulate the casting process.
Geometry & Meshing
All separate mold components (molds, core, sleeves, pouring cups, chills) are easily assembled in QuikCAST. An automatic volume mesh generator is provided to generate the block-structured mesh used for mold filling and solidification in just a few minutes.

Specific Process

Continuous Casting
ProCAST provides a complete solution for continuous and semi-continuous casting process, including Direct Chill (DC) casting simulation. The software can simulate steady-state conditions as well as the initial and final stages of continuous casting processes. MiLe algorithm is also available to study through the continuous casting process. ProCAST also offers a unique capability: the user functions which allow more advanced end users to program their specific process requirements. For example, user functions allow you to define boundary conditions as time, temperature and space-dependent in order to accurately model any specific casting process.
Centrifugal
Centrifugal & Corioli’s force are accounted for in ProCAST to model vertical centrifugal castings, including the effect of these forces on porosity prediction.
Lost foam
ProCAST includes all of the required features to take into account the effects of liquid metal and foam interaction during a lost foam casting process.
Semi-solid modeling
ProCAST is equiped with different models to address the various physics of Semi-solid modeling.
Core blowing
Developed in collaboration with: Ashland, CTI, CTIF, IMFT, Infun, Laempe, Teksid and Weir Foundries The Core Blowing module predicts blowing and gassing defects including incomplete fills, low compaction and poorly hardened areas.

Decision-Making

Optimization
Automatically find the best design for: Automatically find the best process variables such as: Használat: Porozitás minimalizálása, szerszám élettartamának növelése, oxidok mennyiségének minimalizálása, levegőbezáródás minimalizálása az öntőkamrában, stb.
Inverse
The Inverse Modelling enables the automatic calculation of material properties or boundary conditions (e.g. interface heat transfer coefficient) based on experimentally measured temperatures at given locations or times.
Gating Conception
Allows Foundrymen the possibility of evaluating the robustness of one’s process against the natural variation that occurs on the shop floor. (e.g. Metal pouring temperature). This application will automatically run a set of calculations accounting for this natural variation and provide the user with a process window, showing the maximum and minimum variations allowed in the process while still obtaining the desired results

Physics - Advanced Analysis

Thermodynamic Databases
A ProCAST szoftver teljeskörű megoldás kínál a folyamatos és félfolyamatos öntésvalamint a bugaöntés szimulációjára. Számítható a folyamatos öntés gyártásindítási-, üzem közbeni- és leállási folyamata. A folyamatos öntési tanulmányozásához rendelkezésre áll a MiLE algoritmus is. A ProCAST lehetőséget teremt a felhasználók számára, hogy speciális követelményeik alapján határozzák meg a gyártási paramétereket. Például lehetőség van a peremfeltételek beállításra az idő, a hőmérséklet és a geometriai hely függvényében, melyek segítségével bármely specifikus öntészeti folyamat modellezhető.
Stress Solver
ProCAST allows a unique coupling between thermal, flow and stress calculations. The full analysis is performed simultaneously on the same mesh. With ProCAST you can investigate the thermal shock on the tooling during mold filling as well as the influence of gap formation between the casting and the mold during solidification. Hot tears, plastic deformations, residual stresses and distortions are some of the issues which are being tested by our customers.
Gas & Microporosity
Developed in collaboration with: Assan, Doncasters, Elkem, EPFL, Hydro Aluminium, Pechiney, Rolls-Royce, Sintef, Snecma and VAW. Most simulation solutions restrict porosity predictions to shrinkage porosity. ProCAST is the first commercial software that implements a physics-based approach for the modeling of shrinkage and gas porosity. It includes a gas segregation model along with the proper treatment of solubility limit and pore nucleation.
Microstructure & Heat Treatment

Microstructure formation is an important phenomenon affecting the end properties of an ‘as cast’ component. ProCAST allows for the calculation of the types of phases present - the volume fraction of the phases, the grain size, and grain shape - which all determine the mechanical properties.

The solid state phase transformation and the resulting mechanical properties during heat treatment can also be simulated with ProCAST using models based on Time- Temperature-Transformation (TTT) or Continuous Cooling- Transformation (CCT) diagrams.

The microstructure solver also calculates the macro-segregation based upon the composition of the alloy.

Originally developed by Rio Tinto Alcan, a heat treatment advisor calculates the mechanical properties (YTS, UTS, E% and HB) throughout the entire range - from T4 through T6 and T7 - based on Mg variation and aging parameters for the most commonly poured aluminum A356/357.

Grain Structure
Developed in collaboration with: ABB, AETC, EPFL, Howmet, PCC, Rolls-Royce and Snecma.

Grain structure of ‘as cast’ components are important for controlling casting conditions and optimizing component performance. ProCAST computes grain structure, including columnar to equiaxed transitions, for any dendritic alloy. It allows controlled solidification conditions to generate single crystal or directionally solidified grain structure. ProCAST couples a Cellular Automaton (CA) model with the Finite Element (FE) heat flow computations. For this reason, the grain structure module of ProCAST is often referred to as the CAFE module by industry experts.

 

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About ESI Group

Founded in 1973, ESI Group is a leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping solutions and a global enabler of industrial transformation. Thanks to the company’s unique know-how in the physics of materials, it has developed and refined, over the last 45 years, advanced simulation capabilities. Having identified gaps in the traditional approach to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), ESI has introduced a holistic methodology centered on industrial productivity and product performance throughout its entire lifecycle, i.e. Product Performance Lifecycle™, from engineering to manufacturing and in operation. Present in more than 20 countries, and in major industrial sectors, ESI employs 1200 high level specialists. In 2019, its turnover was 146M€. ESI is headquartered in France and is listed on compartment B of Euronext Paris. For further information, go to www.esi-group.com.