Design And Thermal Analysis Of Raidant Tube Heater Magnesium Alloy Furnace System

Magnesium (Mg) alloy was widely used in automobile, IT and aerospace industries, because of its excellent material properties such as low density and high specific strength. As a result of the increasing application, production facilities to perform melting or die-casting are attracting more and more attentions. However, for now there are only a few industrially advanced countries have fully-developed technology to produce these equipments. A few domestic institutes and firms are capable of producing the furnace though technology and performances are far behind. Under this circumstance, the Science and Technology Department of Zhejiang Province's project - Research and Development of Eco-friendly Mg Alloy Re-melting Technique & Quantitative Pouring Furnace - was proposed.This dissertation designed and developed a magnesium alloy furnace system using modularization design method under the requirements of maintainability and robustness. Then thermal analysis was conducted, based on which the temperature control strategy was developed. According to function analysis and the requirements of maintainability and robustness, the heating module and heat preservation module were designed, and furnace frame module was designed using FEM method. With additional safety consideration, gas protection module and Mg leak protection module were developed. Then the furnace was built as the platform and objective of thermal analysis.Based on the technical procedure of magnesium alloy melting, both steady state and transient state model were developed via experimental research. The research studied the relationship between furnace chamber temperature and melt temperature, and between heating power and melt temperature, the effect to melt temperature of different feeding mass and the maximum feeding mass and system hysteresis time during heating up and preservation stage.Using the results from thermal analysis and under the project's temperature control requirement, two control strategies were compared by simulation and field experiments. An optimum control strategy was selected.The furnace system designed and developed in this research features good maintainability, high robustness and satisfying temperature control effect. It can be concluded by experimental results that this furnace has met the project's requirement and design goal.