Experimental verification of hematite ingot mould heat capacity and its direct utilisation in simulation of casting process

Heat capacity of alloys (metals) is one of the crucial thermophysical parameters used for process behaviour prediction in many applications. Heat capacity is an input variable for many thermodynamical (e.g. Thermocalc, Pandat, MTData, aEuro broken vertical bar) and kinetic programs (e.g. IDS-Solidification analysis package, aEuro broken vertical bar). The dependences of heat capacity on common variables (temperature, pressure, ...) are also commonly used as the input data in software packages (e.g. ProCast, Magmasoft, ANSYS Fluent, aEuro broken vertical bar) that are applicable in the field of applied research for simulations of technological processes. It follows from the above that the heat capacities of materials, alloys in our case, play a very important role in the field of basic and applied research. Generally speaking, experimental data can be found in the literature, but corresponding (needed) data for the given alloy can very seldom be found or can differ from the tabulated ones. The knowledge of proper values of heat capacities of alloys at the corresponding temperature can be substantially used for addition to and thus towards the precision of the existing database and simulation software. This study presents the values of C (p) measured for the hematite ingot mould and comparison of the measured data with the C (p) values obtained using the software CompuTherm with respect to simulation of technological casting process.