The Advantages of Casting
Understanding of Casting
Casting is one of the earliest metal thermal processing technologies mastered by humanity, with a history of about 6,000 years. Casting is the process of melting metal into a liquid that meets certain requirements and pouring it into a mold. After cooling, solidifying, and finishing treatment, a cast part with a predetermined shape, size, and performance is obtained. The casting blank is nearly formed, which reduces costs by eliminating or reducing the need for mechanical processing, making casting one of the fundamental technologies in the modern device manufacturing industry.
Understanding the advantages of casting
Casting can be applied to a wide range of objects, such as sodium silicate sand binder. The casting method is almost not limited by the size, thickness, or complexity of the shape of the cast item, with a wall thickness of up to 0.3 to 1,000 mm, a length ranging from several millimeters to over ten meters, and a weight of several grams to over 300t. Casting is suitable for producing complex shapes, especially those with complex inner cavities, such as complex boxes, valve bodies, impellers, engine cylinders, propellers, etc.
Casting is a method that can be used with a wide variety of materials. Essentially any alloy that can be melted into a liquid state can be used in casting. Casting materials include cast steel, cast iron, various aluminum alloys, copper alloys, zinc alloys, iron alloys, titanium alloys, etc. For brittle alloys with poor plasticities, such as ordinary cast iron, casting is the only formative process available, and casting iron accounts for more than 70% of the total castings produced in industrial production.
Castings have a certain dimensional accuracy. In general, castings have greater dimensional accuracy than ordinary forgings or welded components.
Castings have low cost, good overall economic performance, and energy, material consumption, and cost are not as high as other metal forming methods.
Castings make up 40% to 80% of the total mass of general machines, but the manufacturing cost accounts for only 25% to 30% of the total machine cost. The reason for the low cost is that the production process is flexible, and batch production can be organized in a mechanized way. A large amount of waste and recycled metal materials can be used. Compared with forging, casting requires less power consumption and has a certain dimensional accuracy, which reduces processing allowance, and saves processing time and metal materials. Squeezing die casting is a method that involves injecting molten metal into a die cavity and applying pressure to the metal until it solidifies. This process is particularly useful for creating complex parts with high precision and a smooth surface finish. Squeeze die casting can also be used to produce parts with thin walls and intricate geometries, which can be difficult or impossible to achieve with other casting methods. Like silica sol casting processes, it can help to reduce the cost of manufacturing machines by using waste and recycled materials and minimizing the amount of processing required.
Castings account for a large proportion of mechanical products, such as key parts of internal combustion engines, which are castings, accounting for 70% to 90% of the total mass; the quality of castings in automobiles accounts for 19% (sedans) to 23% (trucks); castings in machine tools, tractors, hydraulic pumps, valves, and general machinery account for 65% to 80%; castings in agricultural machinery, account for 40% to 70%; castings in heavy, large, difficult-to-equip industrial devices such as mining, metallurgy (ferrous, nonferrous alloys), energy (fire, water, nuclear power, etc.), marine and aerospace play a significant role.