From HEating to COoling : following loads for the industrial heat treatment – HECO

Related to the metal parts manufacturing, the automotive, aeronautic, nuclear and energy markets require to design lighter parts together with seeking for more and more security and increased life cycles. This antagonist trend is solved by enhancing the overall quality and process fine tuning. As such, the heat treatment, one of the latest process steps is critical. In the same time, environnemental context asks for an almost re-engineered current quenching process by susbstituting the quenching fluids by more environment friendly ones.
This implies the absolute necessity of the knowledge and control of the metal parts thermal history all along their manufacturing process paths. This mastering drives to a specific breaktrough : controlling both heating and cooling as a unique continous and integrated process. This is the objective of HECO : the control of the history of industrial parts along their heat treatment, from HEating to COoling.
Since years, numerical simulation has been identified as an efficient way to perform this control and optimizing work. The ThosT software, dedicated to the simulation of flow and thermal transfers in furnaces and quenching tanks, is used by industrials to address this issue. It has been found that a next step is needed : to reach the quality control targets, the software must gain a precision increment in simulation the overall process (heating & cooling) as a single problem. It must also incorporate coupled physical phenomena such as radiative heating & cooling and boiling.
Considering the variety of equipments and accessories in the industrial plants cnfigurations (fans/burners in furnaces, turbines in quenching tank) and the displacement of the parts from an equipment to another one, the direct numerical simulation is facing new challenges : modeling a growing complexity while keeping the computing time realistic. To solve it, HECO proposes to incorporate reduced order modeling methods (ROM), adaptive moving mesh methods and alternative radiative models (MACZM) to the existing Turbulent Fluid Mechanics solvers of ThosT software.
To provide a control and validation scheme, HECO integrates fine experimental investigation of thermal transfer from the furnace to the boiling according to different operating conditions (type of fluid, circulation of quenching flow, displacement of parts).
The final stage of HECO is performed via a step by step integration of this work into ThosT software by the software editor partner and coordinator of HECO project. On the other hand, the 6 industrials end-users will validate to finally reach an operational new generation heat treatment simulation software.