A recently completed project involving more » The University of Michigan and Mississippi State University, together with several industrial partners, which was supported by the USDOE through the Cast Metals Coalition, examined a number of cases of thermal contact. The procedure utilized to determine the interfacial heat transfer coefficient can be applied to other casting processes. It has been found that there is a good agreement between experiments and simulations in the temperature profiles during the solidification process, given that the primary mechanism of heat transfer across the gap in permanent mold casting of light alloys is by conduction across the gap. Both the simulation and experiments have shown that a reasonably good estimate of the heat transfer coefficient could be made in the case studied. A simple, direct method has been used to evaluate the IHTC. The metal/mold interfacial heat transfer coefficient (IHTC) was the focus of the research. A commercial casting was chosen and studied in a gravity permanent mold casting process. The presence of mold coatings further complicates the situation.
![magmasoft heat transfer magmasoft heat transfer](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marcin-Rywotycki/publication/274703618/figure/tbl1/AS:670341806424074@1536833349366/of-the-shell-thickness-and-temperature-for-those-selected-models-of-heat-transfer.png)
The phenomena concerned with the gap forming between the mold and the solidifying metal are complex but need to be understood before any modeling is attempted. Accurate modeling of the metal casting process prior to creating a mold design demands reliable knowledge of the interfacial heat transfer coefficient at the mold metal interface as a function of both time and location.