Selection Criteria for Investment Casting Equipment

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/msri/050123

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Investment casting is a specialized foundry process, in which a shell is built over a wax pattern where the shell is used as a mold and the molten metal as a cast. The major equipment required for this process are: Furnaces for melting, shell firing and preheating, core debinding and sintering;injection molding machine, autoclave, finishing and fettling equipment, inspection and quality control equipment, shell room equipment, cluster room equipment, die design and fabrication equipment, air cooling and material movement equipment.The process is an NNS (Near-Net Shape) casting process producing high quality products. It uses raw materials like highly reactive metals and alloys, wax, colloidal silica, ceramic sand and preformed cores. The criteria for selecting equipment in various shops depends on the process and the raw materials used. The capacity of the equipment should be enough to feed intermediate products in sufficient numbers for the next stage. The time schedule in each shop is different. A foundry can decide on the degree of automation in each shop, balancing higher quality against increased cost. Similarly, the decision to use centralized AC or air-cooling will depend on the cost factor. The paper discusses the selection criteria for each shop of the investment-casting foundry.

Casting; ceramics; heat treatment