Experimental and computational investigation of heat transfer during quenching of semi-solid aluminum plates under hot cracking condition

•A hot crack study of jet impingement quenching is conducted using infrared thermography.•A 2D- FEM based heat transfer model is developed to investigate different cracking conditions.•The boiling curve parameters are obtained, and the mechanism of hot cracks is elaborated based on thermal aspects. The present work attempts to study the cooling characteristics of 7050 aluminium alloy under semi-solid conditions during the jet impingement quenching. An aluminium plate heated to 485℃ (10% liquid fraction) is prone to hot cracks, causing large fluctuations in the temperature data. The 2-D direct heat transfer problem is formulated with the finite element technique, and moving boundary conditions are applied to simulate the quenching process. The heat flux is estimated from the boiling curve parameters (Qmax, TDNB, TLeid) by matching the simulated and experimental temperature data. The cracks are incorporated as the interface elements in the finite element domain along with the phase change model to simulatethe heat transfer phenomena. The influence of phase change and hot cracks on heat transfer is studied in detail with static and dynamic cracking conditions. The parity plot reveals that experimental and simulation results are in good agreement for uncracked plates, with an error range of ± 3% and R2 = 0.9987. Phase change incorporation improves the simulation results for cracked plates, reducing the error range from ± 10% (without phase change) to ± 5% (with phase change) along with R2 values of 0.9929 and 0.9863, respectively. The Boiling curve parameters for the cracked plate are found to be Qmax: 7.2 MW/m2, TDNB: 190℃, and TLeid: 450℃. Further, the findings show that the crack originates in the impingement zone of the quenched side of the plate.