Nowadays casting simulation represents a helpful and effective tool for the designers to investigate in advance the influence of the casting process on the material strength. Moreover, this sharing knowledge between design and manufacturing engineering, usually called Concurrent Engineering, plays a key role in the design of heavy section ductile iron castings, due to their huge scatter on microstructure and mechanical properties inside the item itself. Because of the measurements complexity, so far only few studies investigated and compared simulated results and experimental data in the field of long solidification time. In this study some thermocouples are placed inside a casting to record the cooling curves and several tensile specimen are core drilled in area with different cooling conditions.
The experimental data are compared with the results obtained with a solidification and cooling simulation. The comparison shows a good agreement between the experimental and calculated cooling curves, while the mechanical properties are overestimated, even if the trend are forecasted properly.