Abstract
The current study investigated the relationship between the process settings and in-die conditions to understand the transitions between the different filling stages and the final pressure settings in indirect squeeze casting. A pressure sensor was placed in the die cavity to indirectly measure the evolution of pressure over time and monitor the filling process to study the in-die conditions. The pressure–time profile was analysed, and the maximum pressure and acceleration of the pressure were investigated empirically. The main conclusion of this paper is that the use of increasing intensification pressures is positive for the casting soundness. However, it must be stressed that there is a strong effect from the intensification pressure on the acceleration that has a far more reaching influence than the actual speed setting. A direct practical outcome is that a high intensification pressure has a more substantial effect than the second stage fill speed. This translates directly to a possibility of reducing the second stage fill speed to stabilise the fill front. Furthermore, this also pinpoints the need for improvements in hydraulics system designs to decouple the intensification pressure from the filling piston motion control.
Highlights
The main difference between D-Squeeze casting (SC) and indirect squeeze casting (I-SC) is that pressure acts directly on the part for direct squeeze casting (D-SC), and for I-SC, pressure acts through an oversized runner with a minor pressure loss compared to HPDC
It should be noted that the pressure acceleration was transformed after a Box–Cox analysis suggesting the use of the natural logarithm
The current study investigated the relationship between the process settings and the in-die conditions to understand the transitions between the different filling stages and the final pressure settings in I-SC
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In a recent work by Fiorese et al [2], the root mean square acceleration significantly impacted the part quality in HPDC and could be directly related to tensile strength. In the study by Fiorese et al [2], the modelling was of the piston motion itself, but in reality, the motion of the melt front would be most critical, and a possibility to assess this indirectly would be through die cavity pressure measurements. The main target is how the settings influence these conditions to provide an indepth understanding of the relationships between speed settings, intensification pressures, and the in-die pressure acceleration since this profoundly impacts part quality [4,7]
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