The heat-transfer analysis is very important to the design of a casting system, because the quality of a casting is strongly related to the temperature variation during solidification. In the analysis, how to handle the heat transfer condition at the mold/metal interface is a key problem. The simplest method is to assume contact at the interface is perfect, but this assumption deviates from the real condition. It needs an effective heat transfer coefficient or heat resistance to balance the heat fluxes at the mold/metal interface. To study the effective coefficient is the primary purpose of this paper. In this paper, aluminum casting produced from green-sand mold. The shapes of castings include cylinder and sphere. The thermal couples were applied to measure the temperature distributions in the casting and in the sand mold. The measured temperatures at the points near the mold/metal interface were utilized to compute the effective heat transfer coefficient at the interface. In this study, three computing formulas are used to analyze the effective coefficient. Finally, the effective heat transfer coefficient was put into the finite element package FIDAP to compute the temperature distribution of the casting during the solidification process.
Interfacial effective heat transfer coefficient Heat-transfer analysis Sand casting