It has to be admitted that this aspect of the comparison has not worked out as well as was intended. The differences in data from various sources underscores a problem that continues to hinder all efforts to simulate castings. The measured cooling curves are presented in Figure 4. The agreement between the thermal analysis traces from two castings appears to be reasonable, although significant differences can be noted. A lthough most data agree reasonably well, site G shows a difference of nearly a factor of two.
Close inspection reveals that it is melt number one that is in serious error.
This value is, therefore, shown in brackets. Again, these results highlight the problem of carrying out such experiments, even when conducted by a lab and experimenters of considerable experience using the best current practice. It is clear that differences between experimental data and numerically computed results cannot always be assumed to be the problem of the numerical simulation. Where freezing time data were not tabulated by participants, approximate values were determined from their graphical results. To identify whether disagreements were simply the result of using different thermophysical data or, more fundamentally, differences in models, the longest and shortest predicted freezing times in the plates were compared.