Avoid surprises by modeling your casting process with unprecedented accuracy
The most important advantage of THERCAST® is its ability to simulate your metalcasting process with great accuracy. You can model new or planned casting processes with confidence, essentially "seeing inside the process" with even greater clarity than if you actually built and ran the process.
You can also model and experiment with processes already in operation, in order to run "what-if" analyses of how you could boost production, improve quality, reduce cost, reduce energy consumption and preserve safety. The accuracy advantages of THERCAST® can be attributed to several factors:
Integrated thermo-mechanical modeling
THERCAST® software fully integrated the many thermal and mechanical attributes of your casting process into a single model and single set of algorithms. This provides dramatic increases in accuracy in many ways. An important example concerns "air gaps," the gaps which appear between metal and mold as the metal begins to cool.
Air gaps need to be understood in their own right, as they can affect the dimensions and other characteristics of the part being cast. But more crucially, a gap between metal and mold also acts as an insulator, sometimes dramatically affecting the transfer to heat from metal to mold.
This in turn has effects on both the metal and the mold, which in turn have additional effects on the air gap and the heat transfer. Another example of this thermo-mechanical advantage is that THERCAST® seamlessly simulates the behavior of metal at every step of its transformation from a liquid to a solid state. Only THERCAST® models these and other very complex thermo-mechanical interrelationships.
Other analysis tools that examine and simulate the thermal and mechanical aspects of casting as separate phenomena produce result that can be significantly less accurate, as well as requiring much more human interaction and coordination, and requiring the transfer of data between different software packages.
Parallel computing architecture
THERCAST® software includes a powerful parallel processing capability, allowing it to benefit from the power of up to 64 core processors. This has two important implications for accuracy. Firstly, it means the process can be simulated with highly densified finite element meshes to capture the physical phenomena at a finer scale, providing much greater process insights and much better accuracy particularly near boundaries in the casting process or parts being cast. Secondly, by allowing simulations to be run more rapidly, THERCAST® empowers you to run more simulations, in order to examine the impacts and interrelationships of various parameters in your process.
Process optimization
With the accuracy and performance of THERCAST®, you can perfect the operation of your casting process before committing any equipment to it, and then deliver parts that precisely meet your requirements and your customers' expectations.
