Techniques for improving computational speed in numerical simulation of casting thermal stress based on finite difference method

Finite difference method (FDM) was applied to simulate thermal stress recently, which normally needs a long computational time and big computer storage. This study presents two techniques for improving computational speed in numerical simulation of casting thermal stress based on FDM, one for handling of nonconstant material properties and the other for dealing with the various coefficients in discretization equations. The use of the two techniques has been discussed and an application in wave-guide casting is given. The results show that the computational speed is almost tripled and the computer storage needed is reduced nearly half compared with those of the original method without the new technologies. The stress results for the casting domain obtained by both methods that set the temperature steps to 0.1 ℃ and 10 ℃, respectively are nearly the same and in good agreement with actual casting situation. It can be concluded that both handling the material properties as an assumption of stepwise profile and eliminating the repeated calculation are reliable and effective to improve computational speed, and applicable in heat transfer and fluid flow simulation.