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Journal of Porous Media

ISSN for PRINT: 1091-028X

Institutional price:	$713.00
Issues per year:	8

Best Paper Award Selection - Editorial Board Site

2006, Volume9

112 pages

Issue price - $155.00

Foundry Core Box Vent Positioning as a Problem of Boundary Optimal Control of Convective Gas Flow in Porous Media

V. Pavan
Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, U.M.R. C.N.R.S. — INP/UPS N°5502, Avenue du professeur Camille Soula, 31400 Toulouse, France

M. Prat
Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, U.M.R. C.N.R.S. — INP/UPS N°5502, Avenue du professeur Camille Soula, 31400 Toulouse, France

V. Vidal
Centre Technique des Industries de la Fonderie, 44, av. de la Division Leclerc, 92318 Sévres Cedex, France

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the gassing step of the foundry core box-making process for the cold-box/amine system with air as carrier gas. A model of gassing is developed and leads to a good qualitative agreement with experimental visualizations. It is shown that the process efficiency directly depends on the correct opening or closing of the vents positioned at the core box boundary. Then, it is shown how the vents optimal control can be studied as a boundary optimal control of convective gas flow in a porous domain. The problem is to minimize the energy and amount of gas injected in the system while ensuring that the injected gas visits every point of the porous domain in a minimum time. An optimization algorithm based on the adjoint state method is developed. The gas transport is by advection and controlled using Neumann boundary conditions. Application of the optimization procedure leads to results in fair agreement with direct simulations of the process. This opens up interesting perspectives of computer-aided optimal vent positioning.