Investigation of MHD Processes During Levitational Heating of Aluminum Products

Magnetic hydrodynamics technologies are widely used in the production of aluminum alloys. They help to efficiently mix the melt, improve the process of its purification, ensuring a uniform temperature field and chemical composition. The industry’s demand for special aluminum alloys leads to higher requirements for their quality and performance characteristics, which causes the development of new MHD (magnetic hydrodynamics) devices and improvement of existing devices and technologies. The particular advantages of levitation melting lie in the prevention of melt contamination by crucible material or other materials, which in case of other methods are in contact with the melt. This paper deals with the study of electromagnetic and hydrodynamic processes occurring in an induction unit for levitation melting of an aluminum billet. The known approaches of numerical modeling for such class of problems are described, their peculiarity is in modeling of interaction of different fields of physics because of what such problems are often limited by software modeling tools due to rather narrow focus and complexity of such problems. To study these processes requires synthesis and conjugation of methods of electromagnetism and hydrodynamics. In this study, the numerical modeling approach described in [1] was applied. Numerical simulation results for the solution of the MHD problem with feedback using a proprietary program for interpolation of field quantities are presented.