Design And Research For The Numerical Simulation System Of Plasma Spray Process

The research is funded on the project"Plasma Spray Tooling"supported by NSFC and the project"Robot Application in Manufacture Automation"from the Ministry of Science and Technology supported by"863".The numerical simulation system of plasma spray process is software simulated the whole process, which including powder deposition process on the spray substrate and predicted temperature field and residual stress field in the coating. The integrated process of plasma spray, which is a dynamic process about transferring mass and heat to 3D free curve surface, is so complex that the general numerical simulation software is not suitable for simulating the whole process. In view of this, the numerical simulation system of plasma spray process was implemented based on the three separate solution module of the plasma spray, particle behavior and coating growth which had already been developed by our laboratory. It is convenient for analyzing material and technological parameters that affect the coating quality via the temperature field and residual stress field. According to the analysis, the reasonable relevant parameters can be given in a low cost and short period.According to the specific data structure of the three separate numerical simulation part, a new way to simulate integrated plasma spray process was designed and actualized with the support of VC++. It realized simulation from spray behavior to coating growth of the whole process with new functions and the frame and interaction strategy of the system. In this paper the first one of two important parts was integrating the numerical system by designing and implementing the algorithm for taking statistics the rule of the particles that spread on the process surface. The other one is implementing post process of the simulation system. It included improving designing of 3D interaction operation of nodes and the way of rendering nephogram of temperature field, designing and implementing algorithms of hunting for the lattice model's surface elements and boundary, function of display information of element selected and making movie of plasma spray process. These algorithms and functions suited user's convenience for analyzing the simulated results. For the more, this system has been applied to the spray temperature field analysis in manufacturing automobile's body mould. It can display simulated data field of plasma spray, particle behavior and temperature field by nephogram of temperature field accurately and the movies of particle transportation and the whole plasma spray process. In addition, the displayed geometric model can be transformed continuously and quickly by the friendly graphics interaction operation.