| In recent years the need for better manufacturing processes have been dictated by an ever increasing global competition that has emphasized a stringent demand on quality, shorter lead times, better product performance, reduced profit margins, and the use of advanced alloys. Therefore, the old trial and error approach in manufacturing is giving way to more sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Process modeling and computer aided design, computer aided manufacturing and computer aided engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) have resulted in tremendous enhancements in the manufacturing processes. These efforts have realized significant savings in design and manufacturing fields.; Heat transfer analysis plays a major role in most of the manufacturing process modeling work. In general the transient heat transfer in manufacturing processes is a complex one, which needs to be analyzed by numerical methods in most of the cases. The focus of this dissertation is to analyze heat transfer processes for manufacturing process modeling. In this effort, the speed and efficiency of calculations is a major focus. This is a key requirement in optimizing the manufacturing process sequences for complex geometric shapes; that has become an important research area in today's manufacturing environment.; In an effort to address the above issues, four different heat transfer models have been developed and implemented under this research. A major portion of the research has been focused on developing a fast general heat transfer model by combining existing numerical techniques. This model is termed the Hybrid model, which is a combination of Finite Element Method (FEM) and Finite Difference Method (FDM). The Hybrid model has been implemented using Object Oriented Programming techniques, which gives the flexibility of expanding the model easily in the future. The Hybrid model is valid for any general three-dimensional geometry while the other three thermal models are valid for specific regular geometric shapes.; A model validation on all the models has been carried out by comparing the models with the widely accepted Finite Element Method (FEM). The validation results show that new models perform as accurately as the FEM, but are more efficient in computer resources and execution times. |
