Al-Ti-C master alloys have been prepared with a novel production method. A combination of X-ray phase analysis, SEM and EDS were used to examine the phases and microstructures of the master alloys. The master alloys have block-like Al3Ti particles and submicron size TiCX with X ranging from 0.49 to 0.78 and show excellent grain refining performance for commercially pure aluminum. Titanium carbides were observed at the crystallization centers in refined castings. It is now a common practice to add grain refiners to molten Al before casting to produce fine grain structures in the solidified ingots or cast products. A lot of advantages are provided by grain refinement, including improved mechanical properties [1, 2], reduced cracking in ingots and increased casting speed [3], improved homogeneity, improved feeding and reduced porosity in castings, and better mechanical deformation characteristics [4, 5]. Especially, for alloys used in rolled or extruded form for architectural applications, surface defects will be remarkably reduced through grain refinement of cast ingots [3–5]. As the most widely used grain refiner, Al-Ti-B master alloys have a good grain refining performance in some aluminum and aluminum alloys. But there are some problems with this kind of grain refiner. First, borides in Al-Ti-B master alloys will coarse by coalescence or agglomeration to form big particles, which will accelerate the sediment process of these particles in aluminum melt because of their higher density compared with that of aluminum. The sediment of borides is believed to be the main reason for the fade behavior of Al-Ti-B master alloys during the grain refining practice [6, 7]. What’s more, these big, hard particles are very unfavorable for products intended for extrusion, deep drawing, or high performance structural applications [8–12]. In addition, elements like Zr, Cr, Li and Mn are believed to poison the nucleating boride particles which make Al-Ti-B master alloys very difficult to grain refine those aluminum alloys with dilute compositions of any one of the above-mentioned elements or combination of them [13–21]. In recent years, some further work has been done to improve the efficiency and consistency of the conventional Al-Ti-B products [22–27]. Some commercial producers of grain refiners have introduced statistical process control (SPC) technique to guarantee the consistent quality and consistent performance of grain refiners [22, 27]. But the problems above-mentioned are still virtually hindering Al-Ti-B master alloys from being excellent grain refiners. Since the early extensive work of Cibula [28], TiC has been well known as a excellent potential nucleant for aluminum and its alloys [29–33]. Some work [34–37] has been done to find a method to produce AlTi-C master alloys, but little success has been made. In mid 1980’s, Banerji et al. [38, 39] reported that they had successfully produced Al-Ti-C master alloys which had adequate quantity of TiC particles and showed good grain refining performance. But until now, there is no commercial product of Al-Ti-C master alloy used as grain refiners. The reason is believed to be the high production cost of their method, which has made it difficult to be applied on large scale. In order to exert the excellent grain refining characteristics of Al-Ti-C master alloys, new methods should be explored to produce the master alloy at a competitively low cost compared with the conventional Al-Ti-B grain refiners. Our recent work has been focusing on exploring new methods to produce Al-Ti-C master alloys at a low production cost and a novel method has been developed [40], which is remarkably different from the previous methods [38, 39]. The main characteristics of present method is the low production temperature (750–850 ◦C) as well as short production time (15–30 min), which leads to a low production cost and high competibility compared with the conventional Al-Ti-B master alloys. The present paper summarizes some results of our work. Phases in the Al-Ti-C master alloys prepared presently were analyzed with D/MAX/RD-12KW-Cu type XRD analyze. Master alloy samples which had been ground and polished using standard procedure were used for XRD analysis, and extracted second phases powders after aluminum matrix dissolved in an iodinemethanol-tartaric acid mixture [41] were also detected on XRD to further examine the second phases in master alloys. Chemical analysis (except for carbon) of the master alloys was done with an atomic absorption spectrometer. Carbon was determined by an automatic combustion apparatus, wherein the sample is combusted in a stream of oxygen and the carbon of the specimen is converted into CO2, which is then fed into a measuring chamber, where the concentration peak is detected with a non-dispersive spectrometer. The linear signal is integrated and displayed digitally after weight compensation and blank value correction. Electropolished samples were examined in a JSM-6301 scanning electron microscope equipped with a Link ISIS energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS) to investigate the microstructures and second phases in the master alloys.