Analysis and numerical simulation of an induction-conduction model arising in steel heat treating (Q415223)

The paper presents a mathematical analysis and a numerical resolution of a model describing the industrial process of steel hardening. The model under consideration focuses on the evolution of the temperature and consists of a coupled nonlinear system of elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations and of ordinary differential equations. This model is posed in a 2D or a 3D domain \(\Omega \) and can be decomposed into one heating model and one cooling model. Once the heating process ends, an aqua-quenching indeed begins and the cooling model starts. These models describe the evolutions of the temperature \(\theta \) of the material containing a martensitic phase and an austenite phase of the fractions \(z_{1}\) and \(z_{2}\) of these two phases, of the electric potential \(\phi \) and of the magnetic vector potential \(\mathcal{A}\). The paper starts with an existence result for a weak solution in appropriate Sobolev spaces, considering a harmonic regime for the electromagnetic fields in the heating process. Finally, the authors present numerical simulations for a car steering rack. Here they use a finite element method.