DIRECTIONAL SOLIDIFICATION USING MICROWAVE CASTING

Abstract

Energy, time saving and reducing emissions are primary goals of all countries around the world. It is the need of time to use green technology for sustainable growth and development of the nation. According to worldwide census of casting production of 2017 over 109 million metric tons of castings are produced annually. India is the second largest producer of castings. Therefore, time and energy saying in foundries by increasing efficiency in production line can help to save resources for manufacturing sector and reduce emission is the main focused aim which is the mother for developing new processing and manufacturing technologies to reduce production or manufacturing cost, processing time, and enhancing manufactured product properties and thus reliability. It is very important that the developed processing techniques should be widely acceptable for all types of materials. Microwave materials processing is emerging as a novel processing technology which is applicable to a wide variety of materials system including processing of MMC, FRP, alloys, ceramics, metals, powder metallurgy, material joining, coating cladding, sintering, drilling and casting. In comparison to the conventional processes, microwave processing of materials offers better mechanical properties with reduced defects and economic advantages in terms of power and time savings. In the growing technology and the cut-throat competitive environment for engineering industries are demanding new and improved processing methods which can be implemented for a wider variety of materials and can yield better physical and mechanical properties of materials than conventional routes, so the present work focuses mainly how to get a product with tailored properties for the particular application by controlling solidification of molten metal in microwave casting process which depends on number of factors in which rate of heat transfer from the molten metal is the most crucial one which in turn depends on number of factors.