Experimental and Numerical Replication of Thermal Conditions in High-Pressure Die-Casting Process

Acquiring reliable thermal data during the high-pressure die-casting (HPDC) process remains a significant challenge due to its complexity and rapidly evolving thermal environment. In industrial settings, the influence of process parameters is typically evaluated after solidification by examining the final casting quality, as direct temperature measurements within the die during operation are difficult to obtain. Additionally, most casting simulation tools lack accurate correlations for the interfacial heat transfer coefficient (IHTC) as a function of process parameters. To address this limitation, a laboratory-scale hot chamber die-casting (HCDC) apparatus was developed to replicate the fluid flow and the thermal conditions of industrial HPDC operation while enabling direct thermal measurements inside the die cavity using embedded thermocouples. The molten metal temperature was estimated using the lumped capacitance method, and the IHTC was determined through a custom inverse heat conduction algorithm incorporating an adaptive forward time-stepping scheme. This algorithm was validated by solving the forward heat conduction problem using the ANSYS 2025 R1 Transient Thermal solver. The experimentally obtained IHTC values showed good agreement with those measured during industrial HPDC trials, with a maximum deviation of about 14% in the peak value, while the full width at half maximum (FWHM) differed by less than 12%. These results confirm that the developed HCDC setup can reliably reproduce industrial thermal conditions and generate high-quality thermal data that can be used in numerical casting simulations.