Qualitative reasoning for filling pattern in high-pressure die casting and gravity -driven casting

Concurrent engineering (CE) is concerned with achieving an ideal and problem free product development environment. With CE many people work together to consider various development issues. Design for manufacturability (DFM) is a strategy that facilitates the communication between the product designer and the manufacturing engineer. The importance of DFM is well understood today. However, the majority of the designers considers only the functional requirement and pass the manufacturing problems to the manufacturing engineers. The primary reason is the lack of proper design evaluation tools.;Filling related defects are common reasons for rejection of castings. These can range from cold shot to incomplete fill. The caster has to compensate for the incompatibilities between the design and the manufacturing process changes or modifications.;In this dissertation, a technique to support DFM in net shape process is presented. It discusses simple to use and quick visualization tools that can be used to evaluate part filling during the early stages of product development. It will help better interaction between the designer and the manufacturer. It will also help evaluate several candidate gate designs helping the caster narrow the search to one or two gate designs. In addition it will help reduce the cost by providing information when changes to the design can be made with little effort.;The visualization tool presented in this dissertation is based on the 3-D volume visualization technique that can be used to directly view the analysis results stored in the voxel model itself. This is achieved by displaying the object semi-transparently (similar to X-ray images) so that the results can clearly be seen. This helps the user get a 3-D perspective of the results and locate them relative to the 3-D geometry of the object.;In this study, the qualitative methods for simulation of filling pattern in high pressure die-casting, low-pressure die-casting and gravity casting is developed. In this method the generation of filling pattern is related only to the geometry of the part and the initial flow direction defined at the gate.;This approach provides consistent and robust results based on the overall part geometry and the user-specified potential gate locations. The results are provided in a few minutes, and can evaluate the whole range of designs. Consequently, it can be used long before any other available tools, resulting in significant reductions in cost and effort.;Finally, the current domain of this application is casting. However, the methodology used in this study can be applied to other net shape processes.