Transient Simulation of a Metal Cooling Process.

Abstract

Transient heat conduction is encountered in metallurgical industries where metals are subjected to different heat treatment processes to enhance their physical and chemical properties (e.g. annealing). The actual heat treatment process involves complex heat transfer processes described andsuch problems are preferentially solved using numerical methods. This work studies the transient cooling of a metal plate using a finite volume-based commercial CFD code. The temperature distribution in the metal plate during the cooling process was well predicted for both the explicit and implicit schemes with the maximum error occurring at the boundary nodes.At the constant heat flux boundary x= 0, the numerical model under predicted the temperatures with a maximum error of - 0.08 %  . At the convective boundary x = 0.135m , the numerical model over predicted the temperatures with a maximum error of 0 .79%. Furthermore more computational time was required in the explicit scheme in contrast to the implicit scheme that required less time. Using the implicit scheme, the calculated time for the plate to attain steady state was approximately 47,000 s.

Keywords: Transient simulation, metal cooling, CFD, finite volume and heat treatment.