Simulation code developed for porosity formation in solidification products
Hydrogen-induced porosity formed during solidification of aluminum-based alloys has been a major issue adversely affecting the performance of solidification products such as castings, welds, or additively manufactured components. Professor Alan A. Luo leads a research team at Ohio State that has developed and validated a three-dimensional cellular automation (CA) code to predict the formation and evolution of hydrogen porosity coupled with grain growth during solidification of aluminum alloys.
Dr. Luo serves in both the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Integrated Systems Engineering. He is also the director of the Light Metals and Manufacturing Research Laboratory, where this new simulation code has been developed for industrial applications. This new software can predict microstructure and porosity which cannot be simulated by commercial finite element analysis (FEA) software. When integrated with commercial FEA codes, this new CA code can provide microstructure (grain morphology, grain size, dendrite morphology, primary dendrite arm spacing etc.) and porosity (porosity distribution, porosity percentage etc.) in industrial aluminum components.
This new research, titled “Three-dimensional cellular automaton simulation of coupled hydrogen porosity and microstructure during solidification of ternary aluminum alloys”, has been published in the September 2019 Scientific Reports. The authors, who reside within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, are Cheng Gu (post-doctoral researcher), Yan Lu (former Ph.D. student), Colin D. Ridgeway (current Ph.D. student), Emre Cinkilic (post-doctoral researcher), and Professor Alan A. Luo.
This Ohio State-developed software is gaining popularity and consideration among several software companies and automotive manufacturers who want to pioneer the use of CA code in prediction of location-specific microstructure and properties in solidification products. This new code is a critical link in an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) framework for solidification product design and manufacturing.
Light Metals and Manufacturing Research Laboratory