Multiphase Simulation of Aluminum A356 Metal Foam Formation Process by Lattice Boltzmann Method

In this study simulation of a two phase bubble nucleation and growth in aluminum A356 in form grip metal foam process was investigated by two steps. At first for modifying current shanchem methos two inline bubble interaction is studied and then two inline bubble integration detail was investigated. Finaly more than two bubble interaction and integration in molten metal environment studied. Results show an interesting difference in bubbles interactions in molten metal compared two other environments. For this purpose at first, for bubble dynamics in molten metals modeling shan-chen model is used. After discretization of problem equation and all alghorithms impelementation, lattice Boltzmann method was used to numerically solve process discrited equations in all domain. By using the developed code in this research cellular structure of metal foam after solidification is predicted in different temperature. Simulated porous structures were compared with metallographic samples of foamed A356 aluminum at 675, 725 and 775 . The results visualy are very similar to actual samples and also the compesion between virtual and actual samples shows best fit in distribution and mean bubbles size between simulation results of current code and metallographic results of actual sample at 675 . Therefore, the current code could be a useful tool for prediction of aluminum foams cellular structure.