An Overview on Cast Iron Research at CMRDI

Abstract

This report is an overview on the cast iron research carried out at the Foundry Department of the Central Metallurgical R&D Institute (CMRDI) over the past three decades. CMRDI is an national industrial research institute, whose main objective is to serve the metallurgical industries in Egypt. This overview shows selected examples of the cast iron research programs covering fundamental research, optimizing melting techniques, developing cast iron alloys for special applications, investigating novel processing techniques of cast iron rather than sand casting, e.g. continuous casting, hot and cold rolling of ductile and austempered ductile irons as well as ausforming of ADI. The influence of elastic vibrations of mechanical and ultrasonic frequencies on the inoculation and structure formation of ductile as well as white high-Cr irons has been the subject of intensive research. The review illustrates that over 30 years, the foundry group at CMRDI has been striving to keep some sort of balance between fundamental and applied research, with the results of the latter being oriented towards developing the local foundry industry.