Towards Location Specific Statistical Fracture Prediction in High Pressure Die Castings

High pressure die casting is an economical means of producing a high volume of aluminium parts, with a design freedom that can enable lighter structures to be envisioned, compared with wrought assemblies. However, cast aluminium parts have been shown to be vulnerable to damage by defects caused by the entrainment of air during the casting process. A recently developed entrainment prediction algorithm, which is believed to more quantitatively predict the distribution of entrainment defects within a casting, was used to predict the distribution of these defects for two variants of the casting process for a commercial part. Using a novel fuzzy statistical correlation method, the predicted distribution of entrainment damage was correlated with the statistical distribution of entrainment damage, as determined by tensile testing. This work demonstrates a verification of the mapping methodology, in which the correlated strength distribution was mapped into LS-DYNA models of the test bars used for correlation. The results showed that the fuzzy statistical entrainment damage model can be tightly fitted to tensile test data, and that this fidelity can be reproduced in LS-DYNA simulations using the methods described, however further work is required to demonstrate the method’s predictive capability.