Energy Saving Melting and Revert Reduction Technology (E0SMARRT): Predicting Pattern Tooling and Casting Dimension for Investment Casting

Cannell, Nick ; Samonds, Dr. Mark ; Sholapurwalla, Adi ; Scott, Sam

Advanced Technology Institute

关键词: Modifications;    Heating;    Investment Casting;    Dimensions;    Metalcasting;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1024605
RP-ID  :  NA
RP-ID  :  FC36-04GO14230
RP-ID  :  1024605

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

The investment casting process is an expendable mold process where wax patterns of the part and rigging are molded, assembled, shelled and melted to produce a ceramic mold matching the shape of the component to be cast. Investment casting is an important manufacturing method for critical parts because of the ability to maintain dimensional shape and tolerances. However, these tolerances can be easily exceeded if the molding components do not maintain their individual shapes well. In the investment casting process there are several opportunities for the final casting shape to not maintain the intended size and shape, such as shrinkage of the wax in the injection tool, the modification of the shape during shell heating, and with the thermal shrink and distortion in the casting process. Studies have been completed to look at the casting and shell distortions through the process in earlier phases of this project. Dr. Adrian Sabau at Oak Ridge National Labs performed characterizations and validations of 17-4 PH stainless steel in primarily fused silica shell systems with good agreement between analysis results and experimental data. Further tasks provided material property measurements of wax and methodology for employing a viscoelastic definition of wax materials into software. The final set of tasks involved the implementation of the findings into the commercial casting analysis software ProCAST, owned and maintained by ESI Group. This included: o the transfer of the wax material property data from its raw form into separate temperature-dependent thermophysical and mechanical property datasets o adding this wax material property data into an easily viewable and modifiable user interface within the pre-processing application of the ProCAST suite, namely PreCAST o and validating the data and viscoelastic wax model with respect to experimental results