Towards Physics-Based Interactive Design for Manufacturing of Cast Parts Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics on GPUs

The current state-of-the art interactive Design for Manufacturing (DFM) for casting is limited to checking designs for correct draft angles and undercuts. DFM for mold filling is limited to finding thin sections in the part. Efforts towards developing an interactive physics-based DFM tool to check design for mold fillability at the detailed design stage are described in this paper. The presented approach incorporates a numerical simulation of the flow of the melt into part geometry. The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, a mesh-free, particle-based, technique, is used to handle free-surface flows. The highly parallel nature of discrete particle methods makes SPH an excellent candidate for optimization through parallelization. Novel algorithms and data-structures for executing SPH methods on graphics processing units (GPUs) were designed. The presented preliminary implementation, which executes on a consumer GPU, achieves a 30× speedup over a serial implementation on a high end CPU. With further algorithmic optimizations, and given the rapid growth in computing capabilities of GPUs, the authors believe the novel method reported here will provide interactive DFM for mold filling within the next 2 to 3 years.