Viability of Flax Fiber-Reinforced Salt Cores for Aluminum High-Pressure Die Casting in Experiment and Simulation

Abstract

AbstractParts with undercuts or hollow sections exploit the maximum lightweight potential due to efficient material usage. However, such geometries are often challenging to produce with ordinary tooling technology, especially in aluminum high-pressure die casting (HPDC). In order to close this gap, this paper investigates flax fiber-reinforced salt made by wet compression molding as a new lost core material that can be removed with water. Three-point bending tests and HPDC experiments characterized the material. The 2D and 3D simulations with aluminum melt and compressible air were carried out in ANSYS Fluent 2023R1. The outlet vent boundary condition is characterized separately to address the geometric features of the outlet vent. Combined with a two-phase flow filling simulation, it allows assessing the actual loads on the lost core material. The simulations show an excellent agreement between the proposed one-dimensional, analytical outlet model and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results. The 2D filling simulations are helpful to prove mesh convergence and model simplifications but overestimate the loads. A 3D simulation predicts stress peaks up to 33 MPa for an ingate speed of 64 m/s. Conventional, brittle salt cores with a bending strength of 15 MPa fail under these conditions in the HPDC experiment. In contrast, fiber-reinforced salt cores with bending strengths between 11 and 37 MPa are viable thanks to their toughness, which was demonstrated by a eight to 31 times higher energy absorption than the unreinforced benchmark in the three-point bending tests. With the new robust lost core material, a foundry gains a technology advantage that opens up new markets, e.g., in the mobility sector.