Obtaining Temperature Dependent Thermal Properties of Investment Casting Mold
Michal Pohanka, Keith A. Woodbury and Jonathan W. Woolley
International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition
New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2002
ABSTRACT
An experiment is conducted to determine the temperature dependent thermal properties (k, rho-cp) of a fused silica shell commonly used as a mold material for investment castings. The mold is constructed by building up alternating layers of binder and silica. Different binder and silica are used for the inner layer, resulting in a thin region with different thermal properties than the rest of the shell. A search algorithm based on the simplex method is used to determine the thermal properties of both kinds of layers by finding the minimum of the error between measured and computed temperatures. Two approaches are used to find the thermal conductivity: steady-state and dynamic.
