OVERVIEW OF SEMI-SOLID METAL PROCESSING OF AN ALUMINIUM ALLOY

Abstract

Aluminium and its alloys are regarded as the most versatile of all common foundry alloys and the variety of forms in which they exist give them significant opportunities to be used for many engineering applications and in cast form for critical safety structural automobile components. Aluminium alloy components are routinely produced by conventional casting, but quality limitations imposed by these conventional casting methods have restricted their range of application and make them unsuitable for critical safety structural components. These inadequacies associated with the conventional metal forming processes for the production of critical safety structural components have led to the development of innovative casting processes known as Semi-Solid Metal Processing (SSMP). Semi-Solid Metal (SSM) processing is widely known as a technology that involves the formation of metal alloys between solidus and liquidus temperatures. The aim of this paper is to do an overview of SSMP in order to have a better understanding of the fundamentals of the process. The paper discusses the primary route of SSMP, the advantages and disadvantages of the process and does a comparative analysis on the mechanical properties of a component produced by Rheocasting (RC) and Sand casting (SC) representing SSMP and   conventional casting respectively. The analysis of the results shows that the superior properties are attainable with parts produced by rheocasting processes than by sand casting