thermal simulation
By using computer simulation of the solidification of the fluent metal in the steel die a lot of potential defects can be predicted in advance even before the die is manufactured. Just as with the flow simulation this minimizes the run in time of new products and also minimizes the risk for large production delays due to start-up problems on a new product.

Thermal simulation of the dies and their cooling channels can also be made and cycle-times can be optimized to minimize costs.

Typical results from a thermal simulation are:

• shrinkage porosity
• feeding problems
• hot spots on parts and in dies
• solidification times (to evaluate the cooling system)
• thermal distribution in the die
• cycletimes

Many failures are a combination of bad flow and unfortunate solidification behaviour and we therefore always strongly recommend to make both flow and solidification simulations. The metal temperature distribution in the part is transferred to the solidification simulation and the solidification simulations are therefore strongly dependent on flow simulation to get the best result. 4C-Technologies deliver reports of the results and also animations of the results in Quicktime format.

As a superstructure to the flow and thermal simulation a thermal STRESS simulation can be made. This option imports all the data from thermal simulation and calculates the related thermal stress in the part and the predicted deformation of the part related to the stress. The results can be used to predict areas where hot cracking and cracking related to the solidification of the part is located.