Dynamics of an axisymmetric electromagnetic 'crucible' melting

Different industrial induction melting processes involve free surface and melt-solid interface of the liquid metal subject to dynamic change during the technological operation. Simulation of the liquid metal dynamics requires to solve the non-linear, coupled hydrodynamic-electromagnetic-heat transfer problem accounting for the time development of the liquid metal free boundary with a suitable turbulent viscosity model. The present paper describes a numerical solution method applicable for various axisymmetric induction melting processes, such as, crucible with free top surface, levitation, semi-levitation, cold crucible and similar melting techniques. The presented results in the cases of semi-levitation and crucible with free top surface meltings demonstrate oscillating transient behaviour of the free metal surface indicating the presence of gravity-inertial-electromagnetic waves which are coupled to the internal fluid flow generated by both the rotational and potential parts of the electromagnetic force.

Parallelisation of a 3-D electromagnetic scattering code

A high-frequency time domain finite element scattering code using a combination of edge and piecewise constant elements on unstructured tetrahedral meshes is described. A comparison of computation with theory is given for scattering from a sphere. A parallel implementation making use of the bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) programming model is described in detail; a BSP performance model of the parallelized field calculation is derived and compared to timing measurements on up to 128 processors on a Cray T3D.