• Koralnik, Mateusz
• Sitek, Ryszard
• Wiśniewski, Paweł
• Cygan, Rafał
• Mizera, Jarosław
• Wawulska-Marek, P.

Abstract

Since ages ceramic molds are used in the investment casting process. It can be seen that there are many varieties of new kind ceramic molds which appeared while development of ceramic science and casting technology. Nowadays investment casting is one of the most dynamically developing techniques of molding. Even if this technique is developing rapidly, doesn’t provide castings of the desired quality. Use of new kinds of molds allows to obtain castings with more complex shape usually made by lost wax precision casting technique. Molds are usually made of Al2O3, SiO2 and aluminosilicates. A relatively new material is SiC which has higher thermal conductivity than commonly used materials. Since now there is no developed any monitoring methodology while drying and cooling. One of the new solutions is to apply thermal imaging camera technique to analyze behavior of the mold in high temperatures and its schedule. That kind of measurements enables to detect of critical defects in ceramic mold layers. This issue is relatively new and so far has not been applied in precision casting.For this purpose, there were prepared SiC molding blends to use on first layer of mold and other construction layers. That kind of layers has been put on rectangular wax matrix and obtained ceramic mold. Wax has been poured from the mold in air. Cooling process was investigated using thermal imaging camera in temperature range 500÷40⁰C. It has been shown that monitoring of temperature changes is very interesting solution to evaluate the cooling process of ceramic molds.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• defect
• ceramic
• thermal conductivity
• drying
• thermography
• investment casting