US 2012/0232858 A1Published application

Material property distribution determination for fatigue life calculation using dendrite arm spacing and porosity-based models

AssigneeGM Global Technology Operations LLC

InventorsXinyu Zhou, Paul N. Crepeau, Bing Li, Qigui Wang, Arunkumar R.

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Abstract

A method to predict a distribution of material properties of a cast component. In one form, the method includes accepting at least one of dendrite arm spacing data and porosity data that have been previously determined, as well as accepting casting geometry data and structural analysis geometric data, calculating material properties of the casting based on one or both of dendrite arm spacing data and porosity data at each of the various nodes within the casting FEA or FD mesh and mapping the calculated material properties to the various nodes of the finished part FEA mesh. The method may be used as a basis for conducting fatigue or a related durability analysis on the component.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A method of mapping out a nodewise distribution of material properties within a cast component, said method comprising:

configuring a computer system to comprise a data input, a data output, at least one processing unit and at least one of data-containing memory and instruction-containing memory that are cooperative with one another through a data communication path;
receiving as input to said computer system nodal coordinates corresponding to both a finished part mesh simulation and a casting mesh simulation;
receiving as input to said computer system material property information from a material property database;
receiving as input to said computer system information pertaining to at least one of solidification simulation components and boundary conditions;
determining values for at least one of solidification time and solidification rate based on said received at least one of solidification simulation components and boundary conditions and said received material property information at each node of said casting mesh simulation;
integrating said determined values with said nodal coordinates from said finished part mesh simulation;
calculating at least an approximation of material properties through an algorithm that corrects for nodewise differences in said received material property information;
and
mapping said approximated material properties to respective nodal coordinates of said finished part mesh simulation.

6 more elements

An article of manufacture comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable program code embodied therein for predicting a distribution of material properties of a cast alloy, said computer readable program code in said article of manufacture comprising:

computer readable program code portion for causing said computer to accept at least one of solidification rate and solidification time values that have been determined from a casting simulation calculation for said cast alloy;
computer readable program code portion for causing said computer to accept material property information for a material that corresponds to said cast alloy;
computer readable program code portion for causing said computer to allocate values corresponding to said at least one of solidification rate and solidification time to respective nodal coordinates of said casting simulation representation of said cast alloy;
computer readable program code portion for causing said computer to use said material property information and said allocated values of said at least one of solidification rate and solidification time to approximate material properties at nodal coordinates of a finished part representation of said cast alloy;
and
computer readable program code portion for causing said computer to map values of said material properties from said nodal coordinates that correspond to said casting representation to nodal coordinates of said finished part representation such that said approximate material properties at each of said nodal coordinates of said finished part representation are adjusted to account for variations in said allocated values of said at least one of solidification rate and solidification time within said cast alloy.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.