Microstructure related analysis of tensile and fatigue properties for sand casting aluminum alloy cylinder head

Abstract

The microstructure and mechanical properties of top plate, force wall and bottom plate in low-pressure sand-casting aluminum alloy cylinder head were evaluated at room temperature. The results of the comparison study showed that with different positions of the cylinder head, the microstructure and mechanical properties were considerably different. For the convenience of analysis and discussion, the quality index (Q) was used to characterize tensile test data, which equals ultimate tensile strength plus 150 log elongation. The top plate has the best tensile performance with Q of 443.5 MPa, while the Q of the force wall (292 MPa) and bottom plate (355.5 MPa) is only 66% and 80% of that on the top plate. The tensile properties of the cylinder head are mainly controlled by dendrite arm spacing (DAS), including primary dendrite arm spacing (PDAS) and second dendrite arm spacing (SDAS). The influence intensity varies with the value of DAS. In general, the tensile properties decreased with the increase of DAS. When the aluminum alloy specimen has small DAS (PDAS ≤ 46.49 µm, SDAS ≤ 33.64 µm), Q increases rapidly with the decrease of DAS. However, when PDAS ≥ 104.33 µm, SDAS ≥ 49.82 µm, the effect intensity of DAS on tensile properties is partially reduced. When the number of cycles is 2.5 × 107, the fatigue stress limits of the top plate (69.2 MPa) and bottom plate (70.0 MPa) are highly comparable, which is mainly due to the similar SDAS and eutectic Si average area. Porosity defects also have a significant impact on fatigue performance. The presence of porosity defects increases the scatter of fatigue properties. In addition, more than 90% of the fractures are caused by porosity defects, which indicates that porosity defects are the main factor causing fatigue cracking of low-pressure sand-casting aluminum alloy cylinder head. Therefore, the casting process should be optimized to avoid porosity defects as much as possible in order to improve fatigue performance.