Abstract
We summarize the past three-year´s activities of Japanese collaboration in the international VHT program, the IMS-VHT (virtual heat treatment tool for monitoring and optimizing heat treatment process) project. The goal of this project is to optimize processes, such as gas carburizing followed by quenching in oil, and to accumulate heat treatment data to create a knowledge-based database. A brief introduction of the developed simulation code is described along with the results of a simulation of the carburized-quenching process of a cylinder, ring (a gear without teeth), and helical gear. The simulation was accomplished using accumulated databases of material characteristics and cooling conditions. We also introduce some examples of benchmark results obtained from simulating the carburized-quenching process with several types of simulation software. A trial of optimizing the heat treatment process by using a database system is presented based on collected data from practical cases.
Keywords:Simulation, Heat treatment, Database, VHT, IMS.