J Mater Sci Technol ›› 2003, Vol. 19 ›› Issue (05): 391-394.

• Research Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

3D Stochastic Modeling of Grain Structure for Aluminum Alloy Casting

Qingyan XU, Weiming FENG, Baicheng LIU   

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
  • Received:1900-01-01 Revised:1900-01-01 Online:2003-09-28 Published:2009-10-10
  • Contact: Qingyan XU

Abstract: A 3D stochastic modeling was carried out to simulate the dendritic grains during solidification of aluminum alloys, including time-dependent calculations for temperature field, solute redistribution in liquid, curvature of the dendritic tip, and growth anisotropy. The nucleation process was treated by continuous nucleation. A 3D simplified grain shape model was established to represent the equiaxed dendritic grain. Based on the Cellular Automaton method, a grain growth model was proposed to capture the neighbor cells of the nucleated cell. During growing, each grain continues to capture the nearest neighbor cells to form the final shape. When a neighbor cell was captured by other grains, the grain growth along this direction would be stopped. Three-dimensional calculations were performed to simulate the evolution of dendritic grain. In order to verify the modeling results, the predictions were compared with the observation on samples cast in the sand mold and the metal mold.

Key words: 3D stochastic modeling, Nucleation, Grain growth