Efficiency and reliability of gravity die casting models for simulation based design

Simulation of Gravity Die Casting (GDC) requires to couple different models for fluid dynamics, heat transfer and solidification, together with material physics properties. Very long calculation times are required since several heating and production cycles have to be run. The simplification of the simulation models is critical to have results in useful times for the design process. The present work discusses the solidification and heat transfer physics with simplification hypoth-eses. A simulation approach skipping the pouring model for the heating cycles is introduced. A realistic case study on an engine head GDC is presented to evalu-ate four possible simulation sequences. The results show that including the heat-ing cycles in the simulation is advisable. The simplified sequences reproduce the temperature field of the die with sufficient accuracy. The proposed simulation approach results in considerable time savings with respect to the actual simula-tions and even in little accuracy improvements.