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Metal cutting/machining is a widely used manufacturing process for producing high-precision parts at a low cost and with high throughput. In the automotive industry, engine components such as cylinder heads or engine blocks are all manufactured using such processes. Despite its cost benefits, manufacturers often face the problem of machining chips and cutting oil residue remaining on the finished surface or falling into the internal cavities after machining operations, and these wastes can be very difficult to clean. While part cleaning/washing equipment suppliers often claim that their washers have superior performance, determining the washing efficiency is challenging without means to visualize the water flow. In this paper, a virtual engineering methodology using particle-based CFD is developed to address the issue of metal chip cleanliness resulting from engine component machining operations. This methodology comprises two simulation methods.

Air quenching is a common manufacturing process in automotive industry to produce high strength metal component by cooling heated parts rapidly in a short period of time. With the advancement of finite element analysis (FEA) methods, it has been possible to predict thermal residual stress by computer simulation. Previous research has shown that heat transfer coefficient (HTC) for steady air quenching process is time and temperature independent but strongly flow and geometry dependent. These findings lead to the development of enhanced HTC method by performing CFD simulation and extracting HTC information from flow field. The HTC obtained in this fashion is a continuous function over the entire surface. In current part of the research, two patching algorithms are developed to divide entire surface into patches according to HTC profile and each patch is assigned a discrete HTC value.