Optimum Design of Chills in the Sand Casting Process

A re-meshing free algorithm is presented for optimizing the size and shape of chills in a sand casting process. The heat conduction in each chill is assumed to be one-dimensional normal to its contact surface. The chill is removed from the casting layout and replaced with heat fluxes applied on the associated mould and casting interfaces. The change in size and shape of the chill is modeled by moving the borders of the interface contact regions. A change in thickness of the chill is also included using a parameter which controls the magnitude of the interface heat fluxes and implies the thermal capacity of the chill. The model is linked to an optimization tool to search for the optimum set of dimensions of the chill that produces a prescribed directional cooling in the casting. A test case is solved to demonstrate the capability of the proposed algorithm in optimizing chill design in complex geometries.