Industrial Steel Heat Treating: Numerical Simulation of Induction Heating and Aquaquenching Cooling with Mechanical Effects

Abstract

This paper summarizes a mathematical model for the industrial heating and cooling processes of a steel workpiece corresponding to the steering rack of an automobile. The general purpose of the heat treatment process is to create the necessary hardness on critical parts of the workpiece. Hardening consists of heating the workpiece up to a threshold temperature followed by a rapid cooling such as aquaquenching. The high hardness is due to the steel phase transformation accompanying the rapid cooling resulting in non-equilibrium phases, one of which is the hard microconstituent of steel, namely martensite. The mathematical model describes both processes, heating and cooling. During the first one, heat is produced by Joule’s effect from a very high alternating current passing through the rack. This situation is governed by a set of coupled PDEs/ODEs involving the electric potential, the magnetic vector potential, the temperature, the austenite transformation, the stresses and the displacement field. Once the workpiece has reached the desired temperature, the current is switched off an the cooling stage starts by aquaquenching. In this case, the governing equations involve the temperature, the austenite and martensite phase fractions, the stresses and the displacement field. This mathematical model has been solved by the FEM and 2D numerical simulations are discussed along the paper.

Study on Temperature Field Uniformity of Dynamic Induction Heating for Camshaft of Marine Diesel Engine

“…(1) Induction heating under dynamic conditions can reduce the problem of excessive temperature in the middle of the workpiece under static conditions, and can effectively improve the temperature uniformity and heating rate in the contour line direction. (2) The temperature in the thickness direction of the cam is significantly impacted by the end effect when the movement speed is less than 12 mm/s. The end impact is lessened and temperature uniformity is enhanced as moving speed increases.…”

“…At the same time, the surface hardness that can be achieved is higher, and it is easier to meet the needs of actual production. In recent years, due to the many advantages of induction hardening, the use of induction hardening in the industry has increased [1,2]. Induction hardening can produce a hardened layer on the surface of the workpiece to achieve the purpose of improving the surface properties, such as wear resistance and hardness of the workpiece [3].…”

LSTM-Based Stacked Autoencoders for Early Anomaly Detection in Induction Heating Systems

“…• C)), respectively. Figure 1c shows the equivalent resistance of the coil cookware that is calculated in [42], as in (5).…”

“…Currently, induction heating (IH) technology is becoming a competitive thermal energy source to minimize the carbon footprint and offer efficient energy management for domestic, commercial, or industrial consumers [1,2]. The IH system has several merits [3]: (i) high efficiency compared to gas or other electric heating because the cookware itself converts the electrical power into heat [4]; (ii) zero carbon emissions with thermal energy production [5]; (iii) fast and controlled heating by controlling the amount of electrical power [6]; (iv) better user safety due to contactless cookware operation [7]; and (v) a compact size. On the other hand, the IH system is vulnerable to several challenges, such as (i) the area of the coil covered by the cookware [8], (ii) user misbehavior that can have a significant impact on gap variations between the cookware and coil [9], (iii) the selection of the proper power input concerning the size of the cookware or the amount of food being cooked, and (iv) the bad environment (humidity and temperature) that causes fast degradation and the failure of IH system components [10].…”

Numerical Solution of Thermal Phenomena in Welding Problems

“…Many methods in the literature, such as [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], consider a non-isothermal melting model, express h and other variables as a function of T, and solve the energy conservation equation in terms of the temperature. These are called temperature-based methods or effective specific heat methods.…”