Within this study, a prediction of free surface flow during the gravity casting of shear-thinning fluids is of interest. An experimental test setup which enables analysis of the casting flow by means of optical measurements is designed and an in-house computational fluid dynamics solver based on the lattice Boltzmann method is implemented. The model of isothermal free surface flow of non-Newtonian incompressible fluid is considered. In particular, the study focuses on liquids which rheological properties can be idealised by the power-law model and its modifications. Parameters of the non-Newtonian models are identified based on the rheological measurements of the applied fluid samples. The gravity casting flow is examined both experimentally and numerically, while the experiments provide a reference set of data for validation of the implemented lattice Boltzmann algorithm. The computational results indicate that the algorithm is capable of resolving well the studied flow for computational grids with low spatial resolution.

在这项研究中，人们对在稀浆稀疏流体的重力浇铸过程中自由表面流动的预测很感兴趣。设计了一种能够通过光学测量分析铸件流动的实验测试装置，并实现了基于晶格玻尔兹曼方法的内部计算流体动力学求解器。考虑了非牛顿不可压缩流体的等温自由表面流模型。特别地，该研究集中在通过幂律模型及其修改可以使流变特性理想化的液体上。基于所施加的流体样品的流变学测量来识别非牛顿模型的参数。通过实验和数值研究重力铸造流，实验为验证已实现的格子Boltzmann算法提供了参考数据。计算结果表明，该算法能够很好地解决空间分辨率低的计算网格的研究流程。