My name is Akash Pakanati and I am writing from Norway. I am doing my PhD in Solidification of Aluminium alloys in Direct Chilled Casting. I am a Mechanical Engineer and have a Masters Degree in Simulation Science from RWTH Aachen, Germany. I have been following SimScale and its progress since the beginning of this year and I am quite excited about the web browser application. So I hope things go quite well for the team and the tool
Anyways, I am curious if SimScale Team is planning to do some simulations/set up some libraries in the area of solidification? Right now it is an area of interest for me apart from many areas mainly because I am doing PhD in it ;). Well to be honest, a full solidification model coupling the micro (nucleation, microsegregation etc) and macro (thermal-solutal convection, macrosegregation etc) scales is little too much to ask for in the early stages. But it would be interesting to see some basic simulations. It would also be an opportunity for me to compare some results!
exciting PhD topic, @pakanatiakash! I used to work on a project, where a finite element code should be expanded to enable the simulation of a Czochralski process. Solidification is really an interesting phenomenon to work on! Are you coding a solver in your thesis for this? What kind of problems are you looking at? Simple or complex geometries?
So we do have quite some requests for solidification from different industry verticals (also casting, especially injection molding) but as of now, there is no functionality in production yet. What exactly would be most helpful for you? What could be a first good set of functionality that you could work with? We started looking into this but have some bigger releases coming up right now. So there’s still time to steer the development direction !
Thank you for the prompt response. I am going to work on an in house solver and most likely I would add some functionality to it. At least, that is the plan for now. But we never know especially since I would be working on this for three years from now. But I think its safe to say I am not going to write my own solver from scratch. Our groups focus is on macrosegregation and the influence of micro scale phenomena (nucleation, grain growth and motion, mushy zone deformation etc) on the segregation. I think in casting of steel and aluminium, one of the biggest challenges is macrosegregation as any form of after treatment is not going to solve this problem after the material has solidified. I would also be working on the influence of grain motion and mushy zone deformation and I would be mostly dealing with some simple test cases from our industry partners. So the focus is more to get the physics right!
For starters, it would be extremely complex to have a full macro-micro model up and running as it is not that simple. Maybe from SimScale we could have a simple phase change model? There are some standard methods (enthalpy porosity) which can do this. Also a good starting point would be to add the solute transport equation to the solver. In the next steps there could be addition of microscale processes. I am also going to use Fluent or Comsol to compare my results in the end with the inhouse solver. So it would be a good addition if I am able to compare some results with the SimScale tool Looks like this is going to be a step-by-step-long-term-plan. But I am excited to see how far we could go!
Sounds very interesting! I put a +1 for you on the feature request for solidification of a fluid phase on the development roadmap. However this is something that will not be shipped in the very near future. But would you be up for some early testing of it, once we have the first version running?
Also any chance you could share some images/animations of your work (if there’s an industrial partner involved that might not work, I guess) to get an idea of the application? Also, what resources are you using for validation purposes? Mainly experimental data or analytical comparisons? Is there a published source for these? We do always make sure that we have proper validation data in place before we ship a specific feature.
I understand that it would take some time to get the first version up and running. If there is a version, I would be interested to test it and compare with the inhouse code.
I am not sure how confidential the research work is. I mean, there is confidentiality at some degree and I need to discuss with my team on what could be shared. I will keep you posted on this space. Regarding validation, we have experimental data which we are going to use as reference. The same question of confidentiality arises regarding sharing of the experimental data. All this is going to be slow process, but I would like to follow up regularly and see how far we can go!
I’ll make sure to give you a heads-up, once solidification comes closer to release. There are a bunch of other capabilities, that will be released before though…
In case you can share anything in terms of applications or validations, that’ll be great. But I fully understand if you can’t, so don’t worry !
!