Since the entrapment of air and the generation of solidified layer during ladle pouring may cause the defects of cast products, it is necessary to simulate the ladle pouring behavior. In the present study, experiments were conducted on pouring water into a sleeve using die casting aluminum alloy JIS-ADC12 to observe the flow behavior by tilting the ladle. The temperature of the molten metal was measured using a thermocouple to investigate heat transfer behavior. The flow behaviors of water and molten aluminum alloy when poured into the ladle were simulated using of MPS software. The experimental results demonstrated that the flow of molten aluminum alloy was almost the same as water, but there were some differences in wave behavior and height. It was found that the solidification of molten metal is not the cause. The simulation results obtained using water were more or less the same as actual wave behavior. It is necessary to use the modified parameters of simulation to verify the real phenomenon in the case of molten aluminum alloy.

  Presently, mesh-dependent CAE methods such as FDM and FEM are used to predict forming shrinkage cavities in castings. However, it is known that shrinkage and coupled feeding processes are difficult to analyze by conventional mesh-based methods. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics is a mesh-free Lagrangian method that is capable of further modeling the phase transition and solidification of a material in the solidification phase for analyzing the sizes and figures of cavities developed in casting products with high accuracy. In this study, a solidification model was employed to deal with the change in material density from fluid state to solid state. Density flow analysis was performed to take into account the mass transfer occurring in the fluid phase and congelation phase. Using this proposed method, the sizes and figures of shrinkage cavities were obtained in detail. However, it was found that there is a need to enhance the accuracy of the results comparing with experimental results.

  We introduced some calculation models to the SPH method to expand the application range of the method in the casting process. By modeling the oxide film breakage and regeneration phenomena, it was confirmed that the characteristic behavior observed during the ladle pouring of aluminum molten metal immediately after the molten metal drops appears in the calculation results. We also developed a model of the pressurization to fluid in the mold, which can be used to collapse shrinkage cavities, and the effects of the model were confirmed. By modeling bubble generation by air entrainment and SPH-DEM coupling, it was possible to trace bubbles while maintaining the calculation speed at more or less the same speed as that of single-phase fluid.