Temperature distributions in titanium dental castings and molds are of great influence on the quality of titanium dental castings, and few efforts have been made in the numerical simulation of heat transfer in the process for casting titanium for dental applications. A finite difference scheme of the component-wise splitting method, which is unconditionally stable, was developed to solve the three-dimensional heat transfer problem for titanium dental casting during the investment cast and centrifugal cast process. 4 kinds of runner system were simulated and the computational efficiency were analyzed by the component-wise splitting method and the explicit finite difference method, the results shown that the techniques used in the current research can greatly improve the computational efficiency of the simulation system. The porosity predictions of 4 kinds of runner system were carried out with the simulation program. The predicted results were in good agreement with those of literatures. (c) 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.