Influence of core box vents distribution on flow dynamics of core shooting process based on experiment and numerical simulation

Core shooting process plays a decisive role in the quality of sand cores, and core box vents distribution is one of the most important factor determining the effectiveness of core shooting process. In this paper, the influence of core box vents distribution on the flow dynamics of core shooting process was investigated based on in situ experimental observations with transparent core box, high-speed camera and pressure measuring system. Attention was focused on the variation of both the flow behavior of sand and pressure curves due to different vents distribution. Taking both kinetic and frictional stress into account, a kinetic-frictional constitutive model was established to describe the internal momentum transfer in the solid phase. Two-fluid model(TFM) simulation was then performed and good agreement was achieved between the experimental and simulated results on both the flow behavior of sand and the pressure curves. It was found that vents distribution has direct effect on the pressure difference of different locations in the core box, which determines the buoyancy force exerting on the sand particles and significantly influences the filling process of core sand.

Influence of core sand properties on flow dynamics of core shooting process based on experiment and multiphase simulation

The influence of core sand properties on flow dynamics was investigated synchronously with various core sands, transparent core-box and high-speed camera. To confirm whether the core shooting process has significant turbulence, the flow pattern of sand particles in the shooting head and core box was reproduced with colored core sands. By incorporating the kinetic theory of granular flow(KTGF), kinetic-frictional constitutive correlation and turbulence model, a two-fluid model(TFM) was established to study the flow dynamics of the core shooting process. Two-fluid model(TFM) simulations were then performed and a areasonable agreement was achieved between the simulation and experimental results. Based on the experimental and simulation results, the effects of turbulence, sand density, sand diameter and binder ratio were analyzed in terms of filling process, sand volume fraction(αs) and sand velocity(Vs).

GPU based numerical simulation of core shooting process

Core shooting process is the most widely used technique to make sand cores and it plays an important role in the quality of sand cores. Although numerical simulation can hopefully optimize the core shooting process, research on numerical simulation of the core shooting process is very limited. Based on a two-fluid model(TFM) and a kinetic-friction constitutive correlation, a program for 3D numerical simulation of the core shooting process has been developed and achieved good agreements with in-situ experiments. To match the needs of engineering applications, a graphics processing unit(GPU) has also been used to improve the calculation efficiency. The parallel algorithm based on the Compute Unified Device Architecture(CUDA) platform can significantly decrease computing time by multi-threaded GPU. In this work, the program accelerated by CUDA parallelization method was developed and the accuracy of the calculations was ensured by comparing with in-situ experimental results photographed by a high-speed camera. The design and optimization of the parallel algorithm were discussed. The simulation result of a sand core test-piece indicated the improvement of the calculation efficiency by GPU. The developed program has also been validated by in-situ experiments with a transparent core-box, a high-speed camera, and a pressure measuring system. The computing time of the parallel program was reduced by nearly 95% while the simulation result was still quite consistent with experimental data. The GPU parallelization method can successfully solve the problem of low computational efficiency of the 3D sand shooting simulation program, and thus the developed GPU program is appropriate for engineering applications.