Modelling of induction heating and consequent hardening of long prismatic bodies

Abstract

The paper deals with the problem of induction hardening of long prismatic ferromagnetic bodies. The body is first heated to the austenitizing temperature typically in a cylindrical inductor fed from a source of harmonic current and then merged into a cooling medium. In specific cases, equalisation of temperatures within the body before its cooling may also be required. The mathematical model of the induction heating consists of two non‐linear second order differential equations of the parabolic type describing the distribution of the electromagnetic and non‐stationary temperature fields while the cooling is described by the heat equation and a theoretically empirical algorithm for mapping the process of hardening. The suggested methodology partially takes into account the temperature dependencies of all material parameters. The theoretical analysis is supplemented with an illustrative example and discussion of the results. Computations have been performed by means of professional codes and single‐purpose user programs developed by the authors.