Improvement of an Electromagnetic-Thermal-Mechanical Coupled Simulation for the Optimization of Complex Processes in Induction Hardening

抄録

Induction surface hardening is mainly used in industrial applications to increase the lifetime of components with high efficiency. Improving the predictability of the process is essential for its further development. The current study presents an analysis of a finite element method for an indirect coupled electromagnetic thermal-mechanical simulation to investigate the inductive heating during surface hardening. In particular, the sensitivity of the coupling of electromagnetic and thermal-mechanical simulation was analyzed. An optimized time step was introduced, which reduces the simulation time without affecting the accuracy. More importantly, the study shows that a high time step only leads to small deviations in the resulting temperature profile, which simplifies the simulation of longer and more complex heat treatment strategies, especially for processes below the Curie temperature. Additionally, the results were compared with a commercial program that does not take phase transformations into account. In conclusion, it is possible to simplify simulations of electromagnetic processes by appropriate assumptions, so they are suitable for further applications.