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Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 197 (2008) 921932 www.elsevier.com/locate/cma

Automatic optimal feeder design in steel casting process

Rohallah Tavakoli *, Parviz Davami
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, P.O. Box 11365-9466, Tehran, Iran Received 12 May 2007; received in revised form 4 July 2007; accepted 12 September 2007 Available online 6 October 2007

Abstract A method for automatic optimal feeder design in steel casting processes is presented. The initial design is the casting part (without feeders) which is placed in a suitable mold box. Design of each feeder contains the following steps: determination of the feeder-neck connection point on the casting surface, initial feeder design, feeder shape optimization and feeder topology optimization. Completing designing the rst feeder, the method attends to designing the next one, if it is required, and the same procedure will be repeated. In the presented method, feeders are designed in a descending order of their sizes. The feasibility of the presented method is supported with an illustrative example. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Casting process optimization; Riser design; Shape optimization; Topology optimization

1. Introduction Since the molten metal shrinks in volume during solidication in the mold cavity, a portion of fresh molten metal should be fed to make up for the shrinkage. However, since the fresh molten metal cannot be fed to an isolated nonsolidied metal completely surrounded by solidied metal, porosity defects such as a cavity and other void regions are formed therein as a result of shrinkage of the molten metal. The cavity thus formed is called a shrinkage cavity which is one of the serious casting defects. Feeders are appended to the casting to compensate the solidication shrinkage and providing the directional solidication (from casting to feeders) so the last solidication points are conducted to the feeders. The feeders are cut o and recycled after complete solidication. Therefore suitable design of feeding system (number, position, size and shape of feeders) is a key for production of sound castings. Further, it is desired
Corresponding author. Tel.: +98 21 66164684; fax: +98 21 66036012. E-mail addresses: tav@mehr.sharif.edu, rohtav@gmail.com (R. Tavakoli), davami@sharif.edu (P. Davami). URL: http://mehr.sharif.ir/~tav (R. Tavakoli). 0045-7825/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cma.2007.09.018
*

to reduce volume of feeders for decreasing the production cost. In recent years, casting simulation is widely used in foundry industry for evaluating designs and predicting formation of the shrinkage cavities. The casting modeling systems, which are available for foundry users today, are software programs which accept a users design and then analyze the design to make a prediction of the likelihood of defects. Once an analysis has been completed, the user views the results of the analysis, and if an area of potential defect is found within the casting, then the user needs to make some logical modication in design and repeat the simulation until the desired result is obtained. Thus, the traditional trial-and-error design cycle on the foundry oor has been replaced with trial-and-error on the computer. But simulation packages are often too tricky to use and need expertness in CAD and solid modeling as well as the feeding design principles. Furthermore the resulted design is not essentially optimal and its quality is function of the user expertness and patience. In recent years a number of papers have been published which report successful use of the numerical optimization methods in the eld of optimal feeder design. The

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outstanding works are Refs. [29,19]. In these works optimal feeder design is formulated as a shape optimization problem and it is solved with the aid of direct sensitivity analysis and gradient based minimization methods. Objective function is dened as the feeder volume and the constraints are dened so the directional solidication along some priori dened feeding paths is provided. In [11,10,13] authors used the same approach but with an especial (computationally cheap) nite dierence sensitivity analysis. In [22] medial-axes-based interpolation method (see [21]) is suggested for solidication analysis to accelerate optimization procedure. The other works related to casting process optimization usually deals with optimization of the boundary conditions or interfacial heat transfer coecients for satisfying desired target temperature trajectory [33,25] or desired target solidication path [12,17]. Although the mentioned works show successful application of deterministic optimization procedure for optimal feeder design but none of them realize automatic feeder design since they rely on a nearly feasible initial design (number, position and shape of feeders), also they need some priori dened feeding paths which is not easy in the case of 3D geometries. In the present study a new method for automatic optimal feeder design in steel casting process is presented. This method takes the casting (without feeder) as an input geometry and designs its feeders so that the nal design is free from the shrinkage defects (or remained defects are smaller than a dened threshold). Conceptual feeder design principles and user contribution can be easily included in the presented method. Another feature of the presented method is ecient numerical implementation which makes it become a feasible design tool for real world cases. 2. Mathematical and numerical modeling of casting solidication From a macroscopic point of view, if eect of the melt ow during solidication is neglected, solidication is governed by a non-linear heat conduction equation with phase change. There are several methods for solution of this equation (for good survey see [8,14]). Selection between these methods is function of desired accuracy and available computational resource. As the numerical optimization is an iterative procedure, ecient numerical method with reasonable accuracy is more desirable. In [28] an stable explicit nite dierence method for solution of conduction dominated phase change problems was presented. The computational cost of this method is same as an explicit method (per time step) while it is free from the time step limitation due to stability criteria. In [27] this phase change solver is extended for simulation of real world casting solidication and its eciency is increased with including a domain decomposition method. For brevity of presentation we refer interested readers to Refs. [27,28] for more details about mathematical and numerical modeling of casting solidication used in the present study.

3. Solidication induced defect prediction As mentioned in Section 1, the main purpose of feeder design is producing defect-free castings (particularly free from macro shrinkages). So prediction of solidication defects with a reasonable accuracy is an important phase in this study. 3.1. Macroscopic shrinkage prediction There are generally three types of numerical models that can be employed to predict macroporosity formation in metals due to solidication shrinkage. The rst one [18] involves solution of the full system of hydrodynamic equations (Navier-Stokes equations coupled with energy equation). Although this model is an accurate tool to study the porosity formation phenomena, it may be computationally costly because at each time step the numerical algorithm involves complete solution of the momentum and energy equations. In the second model [1,2], the full system of hydrodynamic equations are solved in conjunction with ALE method for direct tracking of liquid metal free surface. The thermo-mechanical behavior of mushy zone and solid region are also included for accurate prediction of shrinkage cavity. As same as the former approach this model suers from high computational cost, therefore it is not suitable for our purpose. The third model, simplied shrinkage model [9], is based on solution of the energy equations without solution of the uid ow equations. Porosity is predicted by evaluating the volume of solidication shrinkage in each isolated liquid region in the casting at each time step. This volume is then subtracted from the top of the liquid region in accordance with the amount of liquid metal available in the cells from which the uid is removed. The top of a liquid region is dened by the direction of gravity and the free surface of liquid in each isolated region is assumed to be horizontal. The relevance of this approach is supported by the fact that in many situations uid ow in the solidifying metal can be ignored. Therefore, porosity formation is governed by metal cooling and gravity eect. The permeability-limit of the liquid metal among the mushy zone can be easily incorporated in this model. The implementation of this model based on Ref. [9] is used in the present study. Since in this model, the most portion of CPU time is consumed for marking isolated liquid regions, a new isolated liquid region marking algorithm based on the fast marching method [24] is introduced in the present study (see Appendix A). 3.2. Microscopic shrinkage prediction Micro shrinkage defects are another issue that should be considered in feeder design, especially for alloys with a large solidication interval. In Niyama et al. [20] presented a simple measure for prediction of micro shrinkages in steel casting processes. The Niyama criterion is dened as

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p G= R, where G is the temperature gradient and R is the cooling rate at the end of solidication (solidus temperature). Based on Niyama results, at any point of casting that the Niyama criterion is below a critical threshold the micro p shrinkage defects are occurred. The critical value of G= R is function of alloy composition (775 K1/2 s1/2 m1 in Niyama report for some type of steel alloys). Solution of the energy equation is sucient for evaluation of this criterion, so it does not impose considerable additional cost. Therefore it is suitable for our purpose. Nowadays Niyamas criterion is widely used in commercial packages to predict micro shrinkages. 4. Automatic optimal feeder design In this section we present our approach for automatic optimal feeder design in steel casting processes. The presented method in this study includes the following main steps: (1) initialization, (2) defect prediction, (3) defect distribution and nding suitable location of the feeder-neck connection, (4) feeder and feeder-neck design, (5) shape optimization of the added feeder, (6) topology optimization of the added feeder (if it is desired), (7) going to step 2 and repeat the same procedure until the remained defects in the casting become below a dened threshold (or other dened stopping criteria are met). If there is only one major hot spot inside a casting, the feeder should be connected to the casting face closest to the hot spot. Two or more isolated hot spots located far apart will require multiple feeders, one for each hot spot. If there are several hot spots, with dierent solidication times, the feeder can be rst designed for the hottest one, followed by analysis to verify if the same feeder can also feed any other hot spots. Then a feeder is designed for the next largest hot spot, and so on [23]. The defect distribution step is used in the present study to indicate location of feeder-neck connection. This step is essential when we have multiple hot spots with dierent solidication times. Principles mentioned above are automatically taken into account in the presented algorithm, i.e., the rst feeder is the biggest one which is designed for the heaviest part of the casting with maximum shrinkage defects. In the same manner, the second designed feeder is the second rank biggest feeder and nally the last designed feeder is the smallest one. In this method, it is assumed that the smaller feeders do not have considerable eects on the solidication condition of their corresponding bigger feeders (feeders that are designed former). This is a feasible assumption when the original casting needs some feeders with various dimensions, or when multiple feeders with approximately the same size are needed in which these feeders have not considerable eects on the solidication condition of each other (e.g. there are some light sections between heavy sections of the casting). If this assumption is not feasible, the nal design is not essentially optimal (see Section 5) and it may be sub-optimal (not that the nal design produces the sound casting).

Fig. 1. Flowchart of automatic optimal feeder design procedure.

Overall owchart of the presented method is shown in Fig. 1. In the following subsections the above steps are discussed in details. 4.1. Initialization In this step casting geometry (without feeder), physical properties and boundary condition are indicated by user. Then the input geometry is embedded in a suitable mold box and the mold box (includes the casting) is discretized with a uniform Cartesian grid based on a user dened mesh size. Henceforth each Cartesian grid is called as voxel in the current study. The opensource grid generator CartGen [26] is used in the present study for this purpose. After voxelization, we have a three-dimensional array, F, that stores type voxels (instead of the CAD geometry). In the present study we have two voxel types: cast voxel, F 1 and mold voxel F 0. The mold-box dimension is selected so that the casting has at least a minimum distance, lmin , from the mold surfaces. The value of lmin , is a user dened parameter that is formally selected based on the casting weight and/or the maximum casting thickness. The voxel size should be selected based on the geometry complexity of casting (and usually experience of the user). Small voxel size leads to high computational cost and large voxel size leads to inaccuracy of procedure. Note that during optimization procedure the mold box is resized (due to addition of the feeders) and so the total number of voxels is gradually increased. Another task in the initialization step is denition of surface design space. The surface design space, Cdesign , is dened as a subset of the casting surface, Ccast , which is feasible for connection of the feeder-necks. As a general rule, connection of the feeder-neck to the cast surfaces with small absolute value of the curvature is desirable. Particularly connection of the feeder-neck to concave surfaces (surfaces with negative curvatures) should be prevented as much as possible

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(consider fettling, cutting and machining procedures that are usually required after casting). The surface curvature can be extracted from the CAD model with the following relation: n 1 jr ; j nj where j is the local curvature and n is the local outward normal vector on the cast surface. Note that in practical applications more complex surface geometric reasoning is essential for suitable denition of Cdesign . So using a smart geometric reasoning module is essential for consistent definition of Cdesign . To generate a practically feasible design, it is possible to benet from user contribution for denition of Cdesign . In this manner user can exclude some infeasible surfaces form Cdesign . In the voxelized geometry, Cdesign is the list of surface voxels that have non-empty subscription with Cdesign . The surface voxels are those cast voxels that have at least one mold voxel in their neighborhood. In the present study two voxels are called as the neighbor voxels when they have a shared face. 4.2. Defect prediction In this stage the defect eld in the casting (original casting + added feeders, if some feeders are added in previous cycles) is determined by solution of the energy equation in conjunction with the macroscopic or microscopic defect prediction methods. 4.3. Defect distribution One of the main important steps during feeder design is selection of a suitable point on the casting surface to connect the feeder-neck. If there is only one major hot spot inside the casting, selection of the hottest point (or point with maximum local solidication time) on the casting surface which is member of Cdesign is a feasible choice. But when we have two or more isolated hot spots with dierent solidication times, automatic selection of feeder-neck connection point is very dicult. For this purpose we smooth and distribute the defect eld in the cast volume so that their eects are transmitted to the cast surfaces in a suitable manner. The applied defect eld in this step is one of the predicted defect eld types: macroscopic or microscopic (type is a user selected parameter). The following Helmhotlz-like equation is used to distribute defect eld in the present study: D er lrD d in Xcast ; rD ^ n 0 on oXcast ; 2

have more defect diusion to warmer parts and less defect diusion to colder parts. For this purpose the defect diusion coecient, l, is selected based on the local solidication time. In the present study l is equal to local solidication time. Note that when we use the reduced shrinkage model to predict the macroscopic defects, their eects are usually (not always) appeared in the casting surface, but there is not sucient contrast between surface points to select the feeder-neck connection point. Solution of (2) not only transfers eect of internal defects to the casting surfaces in a consistent manner, but also provide sucient contrast between surface points for selection of the feeder-neck connection point. Same as the energy equation, (2) is solved with the nite dierence method in the present study. The traditional central nite dierence scheme is used to discretize diusion terms in (2). Since accurate solution of (2) is not essential for our purpose, we use 100 symmetric successive overrelaxation (SSOR) iterations with over-relaxation factor x 1:5 to solve (2). After computation of the distributed defect eld, it is multiplied with the scaling factor S d . The scaling parameter S d is selected so that the maximum values of D and d become the same. Finally a cast surface voxel with the largest value of defect (based on the distributed defect eld, D) which is member of Cdesign is selected as the feeder-neck connection point. 4.4. Feeder and feeder-neck design After determination of the feeder-neck connection point a suitable feeder (with its corresponding neck) should be designed and connected to the cast surface. This step is performed by using the conceptual feeder design principles and computer geometric reasoning. The user contribution can be included in this step to provide the better design. Depending on the position, feeders may be classied as top and side. The top feeders are placed above the hot spot, whereas the side feeders are placed at the side of the hot spot, usually at the parting line. A top feeder is more eective because of the additional eect of gravity. In the present study based on unit normal vector ^ n at the connection point of feeder-neck, the type of feeder is indicated. Another selective parameter of feeder is the feeder shape. Fig. 2 shows the commonly used feeder shapes in practical applications. Taller feeders are used for steel castings (e.g., for cylindrical feeders H =D 2, where H and D are height and diameter of cylinder, respectively), which exhibit shrinkage pipe, whereas in iron and aluminum castings, H =D can be about 1.5. Note that with application of the exothermic or insulating sleeves it is possible to reduce feeder height. For small castings, cylindrical feeders are widely used. For larger castings, cylindrical feeders with spherical bottom (side location) or spherical top (top position, blind type) are widely used [23]. Initial shape of feeder is a user dened parameter in the present study.

where d is the predicted defect eld, D is the distributed (and smoothed) defect eld, e > 0 is a scaler that controls the length scale of diusion (e 1 in this study), l is the spatially variable defect diusion coecient and Xcast is a portion of the spatial domain contains only the original casting (without feeder). Note that we dont like isotropic distribution of defects in the cast media, but we prefer to

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Fig. 2. Commonly used feeder shapes: cylindrical, tapered, rectangular, spherical bottom, spherical top and cruciform [23].

The shape of the feeder-neck depends on the feeder shape, feeder position and the connected portion of the casting. The most widely used neck shapes are cylindrical (for top cylindrical feeders) and rectangular (mainly for side feeders). The neck may be tapered down towards the casting [23]. In the present study the feeder-neck shape is automatically indicated based on the feeder shape and type and connection point position. After determination of the feeder dimensions, the dimensions of the feeder-neck are computed based on the available conceptual design rules (e.g. see [3,57,23]). Indication of feeder dimensions is one of the main important parts of this step. Although it is not any limitation for determination of feeder dimensions in this study, but its suitable selection has considerable eect on improving eciency of the presented method. For this purpose we modify the conceptual design principles based on the Chvorinov rule for casting solidication time. Based on the Chvorinov rule the solidication time of the casting is approximated from the following relation:  2 Vc 2 tf BM c ; 3 Ac where tf is the casting solidication time, B is the mould constant, M c is the geometrical modulus of casting, V c is casting volume and Ac is the surface area trough it heat is lost. The constant parameter B can be easily computed with some numerical experiments. For this purpose it is sucient to simulate solidication of some priori designed parts with known geometric modulus (e.g. box, cylinder or sphere) and after determination of their solidication times, calculate B form (3). As the feeder should be solidied later than the casting it is formal to select geometrical modulus of feeder, M f equal to 1:2 M c (for heavy sections steel casting M f 1:4 M c is recommended). Since in the current study the casting solidication time (local solidication time of warmer hot spot) is known from simulation result the feeder modulus is indicated from the following relation: r tf M f 1:2 : 4 B The dimensions of the feeder are determined based on the feeder modulus and shape. After determination of the feeder specications some geometric reasoning is essential before connection of feeder

to its selected connection point (particularly for complex castings). For example, undesirable intersection of feeder with casting should be checked. Also the connection point should be suciently smooth and has adequate area to connect the feeder. When some of these criteria are not satised the connection point should be moved to the nearest suitable point. 4.5. Feeder shape optimization In this step, shape of the last added feeder is optimized with a simple gradient search method. Note that when we have some designed feeders from the previous optimization cycles, their shapes are xed during this step. This step has a sub-iteration cycle that in which the feeder length scale is modied. The sub-iteration is exploited so that the feeder volume is minimized and the distributed defect value at the connection point of feeder-neck become below a specied threshold at the end of iterations. Therefore after each feeder modication, the energy equation is solved and remained defects in the casting are predicted. Then the defect distribution equation is solved and after scaling D-eld with S d the value of defect in the feeder-neck connection point is evaluated. The length scale of feeder is one of the feeder dimensions that based on this dimension other dimensions of feeder are determined. As an example for a cylindrical feeder with known H =D ratio, the feeder length scale is either H or D. If Li denotes the length scale of feeder at sub-iteration ith the new value of this parameter at sub-iteration (i + 1)th is determined by the following equation: Li1 Li ai DLi ; 5

where ai 1 or 1 is the search direction and DLi is step size of modication. The value of ai and DLi can be computed based on the traditional one-dimensional line search methods. But in the present study a simple heuristic search method is used. In this method when S d D is larger than the desired threshold at the feeder-neck connection point, we take ai 1 and in the other hand ai is taken equal to 1. The step size DLi is taken equal to 0.10.2 Li in this study (is reduced during iterations). When the feeder topology optimization (next step) is used after feeder shape optimization, the task of this step can be simplied. In this manner it is only sucient to design the feeder so that the S d D is smaller than the desired

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threshold at the feeder-neck connection point, without attention to minimization of feeder volume. So always a 1 and we have usually an over-estimated design. This not only increase eciency of this step (and also simplify its implementation) but also gives more exibility to the feeder topology optimization step to nd the better feeder topology.

4.6. Feeder topology optimization In this step topology of the last designed feeder is improved by an evolutionary topology optimization algorithm (see Fig. 3). Same as the previous step, it has an iterative procedure too. At each iteration of this step, N remove RRN feeder voxels of feeder is removed based on their performance-index, where N feeder is the number of feeder voxels and 0 < RR < 1 is the rejection ratio. For this purpose at each cycle, the energy equation (and also defect prediction and defect distribution) is solved and feeder voxels are sorted based on descending order of their performance-index. Then, the last N remove voxels of the sorted list are removed from feeder voxels (their F value is converted to 0). The iterations in this step are continued until the value of S d D become larger than the specied threshold. When undesired defect value is appeared at the feeder-neck connection point, the feeder topology in the previous iteration is taken as the optimal topology or the last iteration is repeated with a smaller value of RR.

In the present study the parameter RR is decreased gradually during iterations. Since with decreasing the local solidication time of feeder voxels their performance is decreased, so in the present study the performance-index of each voxel in dened as its local solidication time. This removal algorithm is similar with the evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) methods which are successfully applied for topology optimization of compliance mechanics [30,31] and heat transfer [15,16]. Although there is not theoretical support for optimality of ESO methods but numerical experiments conrmed usefulness of these methods (e.g. see [31]).

5. Limitations As previously mentioned, the presented method designs the biggest feeder at rst and continues to design the smallest one. In this manner design of later feeders are aected by presence of the former feeders, but the later feeders have not any eect on former feeders design. Note that such strategy is the magic of the presented method to select suitable feeder positions when multiple feeders with variable sizes are needed. On the other hand when multiple feeders with approximately the same sizes are needed, result of the presented algorithm is not essentially optimal. In this situation, undesired feeder patterns may be formed or number of feeders in the nal design may be higher than what is needed. For example consider feeder design of a cylindrical ring. The rst feeder is designed on an arbitrary point of the ring surface (top or side based on ring cross section geometry, consider symmetry of ring). In the cylindrical coordinate, (r, h, z), we take (r, 0, z) as the spatial position of feeder connection point to the cast. The second feeder-neck connection point will be (r, p, z). For the third and forth ones, this points will be (r, p/2, z) or (r, 3p/4, z) with high degree of probability. So if number of feeders in the real optimal solution is 2n , n 0; 1; 2; . . ., the presented method leads to an optimal design. In other cases it takes higher number of feeders, so its result is sub-optimal. As an other example consider feeder design for a horizontal plate. In this case the presented algorithm put the rst feeder at the center of plate with high degree of probability. Therefore the pre-

Fig. 3. Flowchart procedure.

of

evolutionary feeder

topology optimization Fig. 4. 3D conguration of the test case used in the present study.

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sented method can not design feeders so that we have four feeders with a symmetric pattern. To improve such undesirable behaviors, it is possible to use a gradient base optimization algorithm (in conjunction with the nite dierence sensitivity analysis) to optimize number and location of feeders in the nal design. In fact, result of the presented method can be used as an initial guess for gradient based optimization methods (e.g. see [11,10]).

6. Result and discussion In this section we present an example to illustrate potential of the presented method for automatic optimal feeder design in the sandmold steel casting process. Fig. 4 shows the conguration of casting which is used in this numerical experiment (longer dimension is equal to 95 cm). Note that this casting is designed so that it needs multiple feeders with dierent dimensions.

Fig. 5. Variation of shape and topology of feeders during optimization in conjunction with contour plot of local solidication time (in minute), complete conguration (right) and selected section (left): (a) original casting, (b) after shape optimization of the rst feeder, (c) after topology optimization of the rst feeder, (d) after shape optimization of the second feeder.

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In this example we take the casting alloy as a carbon steel that its physical properties are as follows: thermal conductivity k = 33.44 W/m C, density of solid phase at the solidus 3 temperature qsol s 7300 kg=m , density of liquid phase at liq the liquidus temperature ql 6935 kg=m3 , density of the liquid phase at pouring temperature qpour 6826 kg=m3 , l heat capacity cp = 627 J/kg C, latent heat of fusion  Hf = 270 kJ/kg and pouring temperature hc 0 1621 C. It is assumed that the density of metal in liquid state and mushy zone is varied linearly as a function of temperature and also variation of the solid fraction with temperature is linear in

the mushy zone. The physical properties of applied sand mold are: thermal conductivity k = 0.7 W/m C, density q = 1500 kg/m3, heat capacity cp = 1128 J/kg C and initial  temperature hm 0 20 C. The other applied physical properties are: ambient temperature h1 = 20 C, airmold interfacial heat transfer coecient h1 = 75 W/m2 C and castmold interfacial heat transfer coecient hi = r 418 W/m2 C, where r is equal to 1.0, 0.8 and 0.6 for bottom, lateral and top surfaces respectively. The parameter r is obtained from our numerical simulation in conjunction with practical experiments.

Fig. 6. Variation of shape and topology of feeders during optimization in conjunction with contour plot of local solidication time (in minute), complete conguration (right) and selected section (left): (a) after topology optimization of the second feeder, (b) after shape optimization of the third feeder and (c) after topology optimization of the third feeder.

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The feeders are assumed to be cylindrical with H =D 1:5 in this experiment. In this example the macroscopic defects are only taken into account. The admissible defect threshold is taken equal to 0.5% (defect = 100 void volume fraction after complete solidication). The rejection ratio parameter (RR) is taken equal to 0.125 at rst iteration of feeder topology optimization and it is gradually decreased by multiplication with factor 0.7 after each iterations.

In this numerical experiments the proposed domain decomposition method in [27] is used to accelerate simulation and Dtmold 10Dtcast . The Fourier number 1 is taken into account for cast media (equivalent with Dtcast 6Dtexplicit ). The voxel size is 7 mm in this expericast ment. As the computing platform we have used a personal computer with an Intel 2400 MHz CPU and 2 GB RAM. Figs. 5 and 6 show variation of shape and topology of feeders and contour plot of local solidication time during

Fig. 7. Contour plot of distributed defect eld during optimization (in percent): (a) original casting, (b) after shape optimization of the rst feeder, (c) after topology optimization of the rst feeder, (d) after shape optimization of the second feeder, (e) after topology optimization of the second feeder, (f) after shape optimization of the third feeder and (g) after topology optimization of the third feeder.

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optimization procedure (original casting to nal optimal design). Fig. 7 shows contour plot of distributed defect eld during optimization. Fig. 8 shows contour plot of metal fraction after complete solidication during optimization procedure. Plot shows success of the presented method for nding suitable location of feeders and their automatic design, so the nal design is free from shrinkages defects. Fig. 8 shows that the feeder topology optimization not only

decreases the feeder volume but also reduces height of shrinkage pipe. Therefore it makes possible to use feeders with smaller height. The total voxels in the nal design are 1124370 voxels and number of cast voxels in the nal design is 250183. The casting yield in the nal design is about 50%. The total CPU time of this numerical experiment is about 70 min. The total number of solidication analysis was 22 times.

Fig. 8. Contour plot of metal fraction eld during optimization (the zero value represents the macro shrinkage): (a) original casting, (b) after shape optimization of the rst feeder, (c) after topology optimization of the rst feeder, (d) after shape optimization of the second feeder, (e) after topology optimization of the second feeder, (f) after shape optimization of the third feeder and (g) after topology optimization of the third feeder.

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7. Conclusions A method for automatic optimal feeder design in steel casting process is presented. The initial design is a casting placed in a suitable mold box. It automatically design feeders in a descending order of sizes so the nal design is free from solidication defects. Success of the presented method was supported with an illustrative example. Enrichment of the presented method with some smart geometric reasoning modules makes it possible to use it in real world applications. Appendix A. Isolated liquid region numbering As discussed in Section 3, to predict macro shrinkages, it is essential to track isolated liquid regions at each time step. An isolated liquid region is dened as the region of molten metal which is bounded by the mold walls and/or melt free surface and/or solidied metal. Since the macroscopic uidity of the molten metal exist in the region where the solid fraction ratio, fs , is less than a critical value fcr (0.67 in this study), the metal voxels that their solid fraction ratio are higher than fcr are considered as the solidied metal. Note that at the start of solidication we have only one liquid region but during solidication dynamics, this region may be divided into multiple isolated regions (see Fig. 9). If nliq denotes the number of liquid voxels fs < fcr at each time step, a crude implementation of liquid region numbering algorithm leads to an On2 liq algorithm which is severely CPU intensive. In [4] an isolated liquid region numbering algorithm is presented based on solution of the Poisson equation. This method was used for marking isolated gas bubble regions during numerical simulation of free surface ow. This algorithm needs solution of one Poisson equation to determine each isolated liquid region, so this algorithm is not suitable for our purpose. In this section we present a simple and ecient algorithm for numbering of isolated liquid regions.

Given a new liquid domain Xn liq at time level n, the task of isolated liquid region numbering is nding isolated liquid regions Ln i ; i 1; 2; . . . ; nreg (where nreg is number regions). For this purpose we dene three additional quantities for each liquid voxel, they are: color eld to store corresponding region number, ag eld to indicate visited liquid voxels and index array to store index of visited liquid voxels. In our computer implementation all arrays are stored in the vectorized format. In this format each i; j; k position in the three-dimensional voxelized geometry is mapped to its corresponding position in a one-dimensional array. Therefore we have one integer index for determination of each voxel position. The following algorithm shows the isolated liquid cell numbering procedure which is used in the present study. Algorithm 1 nreg 0; Initialize the color eld to zero for all liquid voxels; Initialize the ag eld to zero for all liquid voxels; Search in the liquid voxels list and nd the rst un-colored liquid voxel colori; j; k 0: (a) nvisit 0, where nvisit is the number of visited liquid voxels during stage 4; (b) nreg nreg 1, nvisit nvisit 1; (c) Set flagi; j; k 1 and add index i; j; k to the end of index-array; (d) for all members of the index-array (at rst has one member but its members increase dynamically): i. color nreg ; ii. search on its six nearest neighbors and for each neighbor that its color and ag has zero value do the following steps: A. flag 1, nvisit nvisit 1; B. add its index to the end of index-array; 5. go to step 3 and repeat procedure until all liquid voxels has the non-zero color value. 1. 2. 3. 4. Note that number of jumping from step 5 to stage 3 is equal to number of isolated liquid regions. So in the worst case, the complexity of the presented algorithm is Onreg nliq . This algorithm has close similarity with the O(n) fast marching method [32] used for solution of eikonal equation. References
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Fig. 9. Dynamics of the isolated liquid regions during solidication: division of one region into multiple regions.

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