REAL-TIME TRANSPARENT MOULD EXPERIMENTS OF FILLING OF WAX PATTERNS FOR INVESTMENT CASTING

摘要

Wax injection is the first step of the investment casting process. It is therefore an essential step, as many of the defects created in the wax can be reproduced in the final casting if they are not detected. The modelling and process control of the wax pattern manufacturing stage of investment casting is an essential part of the objective of through-process modelling. This paper will present a series of real-time transparent mould filling experiments for one geomety. The experiments were carried out under a range of process conditions including varying temperature, flow rate and gating position. The research programme investigated other geometries and these will be published elsewhere.rnThe experiments clearly show the different filling characteristics of liquid wax and semi-solid wax as well as a number of other phenomena such as air entrapment, solid material transfer. The paper also presents thermo-physical and rheological data for the waxes used. This is a unique and comprehensive set of data that will enable modellers to test CFD codes against close to industrial geometries. This paper does not present modeling results although the authors have previously published some work detailing some limited attempts at numerical modeling of the process.