Numerical Simulation of Water Quenching Process of an Engine Cylinder Head

Presented is a simulation of an engine cylinder head undergoing water quenching process using a recently developed approach for modeling quenching cooling of metal parts (Wang et al., 2002). The approach is based on the AVL SWIFT Eulerian two-fluid method with special emphasis on handling high mass exchange rate associated with quenching. A tetrahedral grid of 830,000 cells is generated for the computational domain, which includes the solid part of the cylinder head immersed in the fluid. Detailed vapor and temperature distributions are obtained which offer valuable information for the thermal stress analysis. It is observed that the temperature field within the cylinder head is highly non-uniform. The computed cylinder head monitoring point temperature versus time is compared with that registered by the thermal couple measurement. Reasonable agreement is observed. The simulation exercise may potentially be used to identify the cause of cracks often encountered in quenching heat treatment thereby lead to a better design of the process.