Integration of casting simulation and finite element

calculation
Dr. ir. M.E. Heerschap MG technical solutions, Noordkade 64, Waddinxveen, The Netherlands (www.mgts.nl)
Email: mart.heerschap@mgts.nl
Dr. Y. Ling, Dr.ir. F. Mampaey, ir. R.E.F. Kastelein WTCM Foundry Centre, Technologiepark 915, B-9052 Zwijnaarde, Belgium (www.wtcm.be)
Email: roy.kastelein@wtcm.be

ABSTRACT: Both casting simulation and finite element simulations exist for quite some time. Up to now these
were separate fields of expertise.
In general a finite element analysis of a casting is performed to make sure that all mechanical requirements for
the product are met. For the finite element analysis the usual assumption is that the product is initially stress free
in unloaded condition. The material properties, most often taken from literature, are assumed to be homogeneous
throughout the complete product. Both assumptions are not correct.
After casting important residual stresses remain, caused by solidification and cooling to room temperature. The
material properties are distributed in an inhomogeneous way over the complete product, depending on the wall
thickness in the part.
By integration of casting and finite element analysis these drawbacks has been overcome. The material
properties are modelled from experiments and the magnitude and the distribution are predicted by the casting
simulation. The thermal or residual stresses in the casting are calculated too and transferred to the finite element
analysis for a more accurate prediction of the actual behaviour. In this paper the integration of ViewCast and
MSC.MARC is described.

Traditional development of products by casting

Products manufactured by casting are designed with a focus on the functional requirements for the product. The
limitations of the production process require design adjustments usually. These adjustments are in general small
details like clearance angles, radii and moderation of thickness changes. These adjustments are made
simultaneously or in a later stage of the design process. When the product drawings are finished, a model is
made. This model also includes the pouring system and risers. The foundry experts indicate how the pouring
system must look like. The design of the pouring system is based on years of experience completed with gut
feeling.
After fabrication of the production tools, the prototypes are cast. The prototype is examined by X-ray or cut in
pieces to reveal voids in the projected area. Voids elsewhere in the casting remain undetected. If voids, or other
casting defects, are found, the pouring system and risers are modified in an attempt to solve the problems.
Besides the pouring system and risers adjustments also can be made to the design of the product or production
process.
When the prototype passes the visual inspection for casting defects, the prototype is subjected to an experimental
mechanical test. If the product fails the test, obviously the design must change. After the design change the
complete process is repeated to arrive at an acceptable product. This process is shown schematically in figure 1.
It will be quite obvious that this way of producing cast parts is a slow and expensive one. To reduce the time for
the design process it is quite common to over dimension the casting. In that case the specifications for both the
functional behaviour of the product as well as the requirements originating from the production process are more
easily met.
In cases where the cast product is cheap to manufacture and the weight is of less importance this approach is a
valid one. However, quite often the weight of the product matters. For example an expensive alloy is used for the
casting. When the design process is also focussed on creating an efficient design, a number of design iterations
are inevitable. These design iterations are time consuming and expensive. Improvement of the design process
can be achieved by replacing the experimental mechanical tests by finite element calculations. A major leap in
process improvement can be achieved by introducing casting simulation. All trial and error steps are the virtual,
implying that the first prototype has no casting flaws anymore.

Description of casting simulation

The simulation of the casting process is carried out using the finite volume (FVM) or finite element method (FEM),
figure 2. Both methods have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be summarized as follows.
The FEM mesh is very suitable for thin-walled complex castings; the number of elements is usually quite low so
the calculation can be quite fast. However the creation of the mesh requires a lot of skills and time of the operator,
especially for the complex castings. The FVM mesh generator is fully automatic and takes also for a complex
casting but a few seconds. The physical interpretation of a fluid medium passing though volumetric cells is more
straightforward to understand and to solve. The representation of the geometry is like a LEGO-model like figure 3
and as a consequence some energy-loss can occur on curved surface boundaries. A fine mesh is needed to
minimize this effect. Without going into too much detail, it is clear that hard work is being done on both methodes
to overcome the disadvantages.
Anyway the casting simulation program used in this paper is ViewCast, which is based on the finite volume
method. ViewCast is used to predict voids in a casting. Voids can be generated in a casting by three different
phenomena:
-

Gas formation

Air entrapment.

Shrinkage or porosity

Gas formation is a problem that occurs when the melt is not enough degassed. Hydrogen or Nitrogen atoms are
dissolved in the liquid metal, which recombine to H2 or N2 during solidification. Thousands of small spherical
pine-holes are visible inside the casting. By a good degassing procedure this problem is solved. In the casting
simulation a perfectly degassed melt is assumed.

Air entrapment is caused by a turbulent mould filling, which is indicated by carefully interpreting a mould filling
simulation of ViewCast, c.f. figure 4. In reality the entrapped air will attempt to escape through the mould, but it is
very difficult to simulate this effect accurately, because the permeability of the mould is not equally distributed. In
ViewCast an empirical model, based on casting experiments, has been build-in to impose a velocity in the cavity
below 50 cm/s at which no turbulence will occur in a liquid metal flow.
Most of the problems in a foundry however are caused by shrinkage, due to a volume reduction of an alloy during
the solidification process. The volumetric shrinkage depends strongly on the type of alloy. Aluminium alloys for
example have a volume reduction of ca. 5-7%, but certain ferrous alloys with enough carbon can have the
shrinkage fully compensated by carbon-expansion. Shrinkage defects appear like big craters in the casting and
are very harmful for mechanical failure and leakage.
Obviously foundries must prevent shrinkage defects or porosities in their castings thus they add so-called risers
(reservoirs) on top of their castings to refill the casting during solidification. For this casting simulation software
like ViewCast is developed. With ViewCast the mould filling and solidification can be simulated and the shrinkage
defects are predicted accurately both in location and in volume, cf. figure 5. Empirical models in ViewCast
prescribe the volume needed to compensate the shrinkage; a casting simulation is carried out to check if the
risers can feed the complete product, what depends on the geometry of the casting. By adapting the riser location
and the pouring system the shrinkage defects can be solved before tooling equipment is produced and a
prototype is cast.
Recent developments in ViewCast can solve deformation problems caused by thermal stresses during cooling
after casting or after heat treatment, figure 6. High thermal stresses on certain spots can even generate cracks in
the casting. It will be clear that thermal stresses in a casting are very important on the failure behaviour during
mechanical loading in its application. All these phenomena can be predicted by casting analysis instead of
working on a trial and error basis.

Integration and interface

Usually when products are designed finite element analysis is used to check that the (thermo-) mechanical
requirements for the product are met. In a more advanced approach the finite element analysis is combined with
an optimization, to create an optimum design. The results of a finite element analysis, or a finite element driven
design cycle, however, are as good as its input. In other words, when the starting point of a finite element analysis
contains errors, the final result will be wrong. Even when the structure has been optimized, the product is suboptimal at best. It might even get worse; the requirements for the product are not met anymore.
This situation is not purely hypothetical, illustrated by the following example. A part intended for the use in off
shore applications was designed as casting of a high strength steel. After casting the part was subjected to
several heat treatments. The structure was optimized using a stress-free initial state and using the strength data
from literature. The prototypes were subjected to mechanical testing. The large specimens failed at substantially
lower loads than was predicted by the finite element computations. Research on the remains of the failed
specimens showed that the heat treatments had the intended results for the smaller specimens but failed for the
large specimens. Modification of the heat treatment later on resulted in shrinkage cracks. All these problems
could have been prevented when the integration of casting simulation and finite element simulation had been
used.
This example shows the clear need for information transfer from the casting simulation to the finite element
simulation. In order to achieve an information exchange between the casting simulation and the finite element
simulation an interface has been made. The general idea behind the interface is to use some of the data
computed for the casting simulation in the finite element calculation. The interface is initially set up as a standalone program. The data required by the finite element simulation is in some cases already present and can in
other cases be computed relatively simple. The next step was to define a standard for the information exchange.
A dedicated file with a pre-defined format was used. This file is read by the interface. The interface needs also to
know about the MSC.MARC finite element model. Based on this information the mapping of the results of the
casting simulation to the MSC.MARC model can take place. This is shown in figure 7 schematically. The major
difficulty in the mapping of the ViewCast data to the MSC.MARC mesh is the difference in the two meshes. The
ViewCast mesh is a fairly dense finite volume mesh and the MSC.MARC mesh a coarser finite element mesh. In
the example discussed later, the ViewCast mesh consists of a few hundred thousand elements, while the
MSC.MARC mesh contains less than twenty thousand elements only. This means that per MSC.MARC element
there are many more ViewCast elements. In spite of the fact that an averaging technique is implemented, it is
likely that the resulting pre-stresses do not form an equilibrium. Therefore it is common practice to make the initial

load case in MSC.MARC a case where no loads, except the pre-stresses are applied. The structure can set and
the initial stress state can be visually compared to the ViewCast data.
Another issue is the CPU time required by the interface. As stated before, there are many ViewCast elements and
quite some MSC.MARC elements. In order to search for the correct combinations of elements the most
straightforward search algorithm requires a CPU time proportional to the number of elements squared. It is
needless to mention that CPU times using this amount of elements will be excessive. To limit the amount of CPU
time required a voxel based search technique is implemented. This search technique is far more efficient and
limits the CPU time to less than a minute.
The output of the interface is a part of a MSC.MARC input or a MSC.MARC Mentat procedure file. The part of the
MSC.MARC input file is the part of he file that contains the initial stresses of the FE model. When the original
MSC.MARC input file and this extra file are merged, the analysis can be started. A more solid way is to write out a
MSC.MARC Mentat procedure file, read it using Mentat and have Mentat write out a new MSC.MARC input file. In
the latter case the data of the initial stresses are also stored in the Mentat mud file.

Example
A manufacturer of lighting poles and accessories produces base plates for lightening poles in large quantities. An
example of such base plate is shown in figure 8. Primary objective of the manufacturer was to create a lighter,
more efficient base plate. Secondary objectives were to create a smoother exterior and reduce the assembly time.
An initial design of the new base plate was made, analysed using MSC.MARC and adapted where required.
These analyses took place in the usual way. Meaning that a homogeneous strength and an initially stress free
state were assumed. When this converged to an acceptable situation, the current configuration was used as start
point for the casting analysis.
The casting analysis started with the initial design of the fillers and the risers. The first analysis was completed.
Design changes were incorporated and re-analysed. In a certain stage design modifications were made also in
the product. By smart redistribution of material this was achieved without a weight penalty. When the casting
analysis had converged a new finite element analysis was performed, now introducing the thermal stresses in the
finite element model. A modified resulting stress distribution was found. Remarkable to mention is that the
maximum Von Mises pre-stress was around 80 MPa. The yield stress of the used aluminium alloy is 160 MPa.
This implies that at some locations of the model approximately 50% of the yield strength is added or disappeared,
depending on the sign of the stresses. These pre-stresses are apparently influencing the final stress distribution
significantly. Incorporating the effect of the pre-stressing some additional material redistribution and weight
savings were performed. Resulting in a truly optimum structure.
The finite element model consists of two base plates four pre-stressed bolts, a part of a lighting pole, a rigid
surface representing the concrete base and four rigid surfaces representing the anchor bolts. This is shown in
figure 9. The lighting pole is loaded subsequently by bending moments in two directions, shear forces in two
directions and a simultaneously acting twisting moment. The analysis started with a load case where the two parts
of the base plate were bolted together, by pre-stressing the bolts. The pole is squeezed in between the base
plates. Some local plasticity occurs in the pole. The subsequent load case tightens the anchor bolts and finally all
load combinations are applied. This procedure resulted in a new range of base plates, of which an example is
shown in figure 10.

Conclusions and recommendations

The procedure as demonstrated here shows that the accuracy of finite element of cast products can be increased
significantly by integration with a casting simulation. The magnitude of frozen stresses after casting of the product,
can reach 50% of the yield stress. Ignoring these effects can lead to expensive redesigns in a later stage in the
design process. The technique of casting simulation is valuable as a trouble shooting technique, but even more
as predictive engineering tool.
Future improvement of the integration software is aimed to make the initial stresses available to other finite
element codes than MSC.MARC only. At the moment it is investigated what effect the frozen stresses have on
vibrating structures. It is believed that for example the cast parts of an internal combustion engine may be
effected significantly by the frozen stresses and possible casting defects.

Initial design

Design adjustments

Model with fillers and risers

Prototype casting

Visual inspection by saw cuts

Requirements met?

Mechanical tests

Requirements met?

Functional prototype

figure 1: traditional design and production of cast products

FEM

FVM

figure 2: typical difference in mesh between the finite element method (FEM) and
finite volume method (FVM)

figure 3: example of a FVM-mesh

figure 4: mould-filling example of a part (which is calculated half for symmetrical

reasons)

figure 5: shrinkage prediction in a casting (which is calculated half for

symmetrical reasons)

figure 6: thermal stress (up to 100 MPa) and deformation (50x) due to different
cooling rates

ViewCast
interface file

MSC.MARC
input file

Interface

MSC.MARC
procedure file

Addition to
MSC.MARC

Manual merge
MSC.MARC Mentat

New
MSC.MARC

figure 7: flow diagram interface between ViewCast and MSC.MARC

figure 8: original base plate

figure 9: exploded view of finite element model

figure 10: final product

10