A NOVEL OPENFOAM SOLVER FOR ALUMINIUM ALLOY PROFILE EXTRUSION

The aluminum alloy extrusion industry aims at reducing the production costs, which can be achieved by optimizing the design of the die (the tool that shapes the aluminum alloy profile into the desired cross-section), extending the life and increasing its performance. Physical tests, comprising experimental flow balancing checks until the flow is uniformly distributed and the profile geometry is satisfactory, present a very high cost since each test can cost several hundred euros, and each die can be subject to many trial-and-error iterations. In this context, aluminum alloy extrusion companies are looking for alternatives that aim to reduce the overall costs, reducing physical tests and improving the design procedures. With the inception of computational tools, in the 90s, several commercial software that allows dealing with metal forming processes were developed. The only limitation is that it is not possible to adapt the codes to the specific needs of companies, for instance, new constitutive models and/or boundary conditions. This work aimed at the development of code capable of modeling the extrusion of aluminum alloys, using the most promising models identified in the literature, and to assess its suitability to support the designer on the conception of the extrusion die. Figure 1 presents the velocity field at the die outlet predicted by the code developed in OpenFOAM computational library. The results obtained in the validation and verification tests are consistent, allowing to provide the adequacy of the developed code for supporting the design of dies for the extrusion of aluminum alloy profiles.