Thermo-Mechanical Model of Solidification Processes

Many manufacturing and fabrication processes such asfoundry shape casting continuous casting and weldinghave common solidification phenomena such as thermalstress development. One of the most important and complex among them is continuous casting which produces 90% of steel today.A new computationally efficient algorithm has beenimplemented into the commercial package Abaqus usinga user-defined subroutine (UMAT) to solve for thermalstresses strains and displacements in realisticcontinuous casting processes which involve highlynonlinear constitutive relations. The model issuccessfully validated with available analyticalsolidification solutions and applied to simulatetemperature and stress development of a solidifyingsteel shell in several continuous casting molds underrealistic operating conditions. Besides continuouscasting the model from this book can be a valuabletool in modeling other classes of metal and nonmetal materials with highly nonlineartime-dependant constitutive laws.