PERFORMANCE STUDY OF LM6 ALLOY CASTINGS PRODUCED BY INVESTMENT CASTING PROCESS

Abstract

The casting of liquid metals to produce solid objects is a manufacturing process that has been practiced for over 5000 years, with investment casting being one of the oldest known metals shaping methods Investment casting / precision casting or the "lost wax" or "Cire Perdue" process. There are number of advantages that have been claimed for investment casting process in comparison to ordinary sand casting process. As there is no difficult to remove the pattern so complex shapes can be produced by this process. It is an ideal process for achieving desired dimensional accuracy as no rapping allowance has to given. Any metal can be shaped by this process. The objective of the present work is to find the optimum wax — mix and then to investigate the effect of various investment casting process parameters on the quality of the castings and to obtain the optimal sets of process parameters. The Taguchi technique has been used to investigate the effect of the investment casting process parameters and subsequently to predict sets of optimal parameters for optimum quality characteristics. The investment casting process parameters considered were the type of binder, wax composition, firing temperature of mould and pouring temperature. Influences of these parameters were studied on mechanical properties of LM6 alloy castings.