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Mould & Core Material for the Steel Foundry
Mould & Core Material for the Steel Foundry
Mould & Core Material for the Steel Foundry
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Mould & Core Material for the Steel Foundry

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Mould and Core Materials for Steel Foundry covers the significant progress in the development of various types of mould and core materials for steel founding. This book is composed of 17 chapters, and begins with the presentation of the testing procedures for the materials’ properties such as green and dry strengths, permeability, amount of gas evolved, shatter index together with hardness of rammed moulds. The next chapters provide the testing procedures and routine control of sand, silica, non-siliceous materials, binders, and clay bond. These topics are followed by discussions on sand preparation, shell mould, and other core materials, such as furanes. This book describes some steel foundry processes, including heat extraction, casting, and hot tear. The final chapters deal with the reconditioning and reclamation of sand, casting and scab defects, evaluation of high temperature properties, and the technical control of raw materials to ensure conformation to the specified standards.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 28, 2014
ISBN9781483226958
Mould & Core Material for the Steel Foundry

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Mould & Core Material for the Steel Foundry - A. D. Sarkar

(3347/67)

PREFACE

A look at the various types of mould and core material available today will show that there has been a steady progress in the development of that important aspect of steel founding. About a decade ago when the carbon dioxide process was finding application in this country, zealous foundrymen described it as a new epoch. This was later supplemented by the air-set materials and there is a continuing interest in this field of chemically hardened moulds and cores. I myself, among others, have often wondered if clay-bonded sands would soon become a thing of the past. However, the trend appears to be that the natural sands and the synthetic greensand mixes are going to stay for a long time unless the non-clay-bonded materials become cheaper and more plentiful than they are today.

The first conditions which a mould or core material must fulfil are that it must be workable, i.e. it must have a degree of flowability and that it must have adequate strengths for the constructed moulds to retain their rigidity. Much work has therefore been done to understand the filler grains and the bonding media in the green state. It is equally important that the mould-core surfaces are able to resist the washing action of the flowing metal during casting and remain rigid until the casting has solidified or to breakdown at an appropriate stage when the casting is contracting.

While writing this book I have assumed that a reader unfamiliar with mould and core making principles will read the first chapter of my book on the carbon dioxide process, published by Pergamon Press. In this book the subject of mould and core material is considered in terms of their green properties and the chapter on sand testing summarizes the more established parameters used in most steel foundries for assessment of foundry sands. One theory of the mechanism of green bonding is given and the pertinent aspects of processing foundry mould and core materials are also discussed. Of the casting defects, scab and hot tear have received much attention, and two individual chapters are given to them. The high temperature properties of mould and core materials have always been a favourite subject with me. There is a very large number of papers given by various workers on the subject of hot strengths of foundry sands, but it is doubtful if a correlation between these properties and casting defects has been definitely established. Sand technicians are anxious to find suitable acceptance tests on high temperature properties which would give some definite indication with regard to the behaviour of hot mould and core interfaces in terms of casting defects. This subject should be pursued in close collaboration with production castings. I have discussed the aspects of hot and retained strengths in my book on the carbon dioxide process, and the possible role of high temperature properties on cast quality has again been indicated in this work wherever necessary together with a chapter giving a brief résumé of hot strength studies by research workers.

For the last 4 years I have been in the employment of Head Wrightson and Company Limited, and I was given the opportunity of gaining first-hand information on castings made in plain carbon and alloy steels employing the most up to date mould and core making techniques in their steel foundries. This gave me the background to attempt a book of this kind, and I am grateful to them. I acknowledge my thanks to British Industrial Sand Limited, Ridsdale and Company Limited, Pneulec Limited, August’s Limited, F. & M. Supplies Limited, Harborough Construction Company Limited, the Fordath Engineering Company Limited, Catalin Limited and Sternol Limited for giving permission to reproduce illustrations and information. Table 25 is reproduced from B.S. 2564:1955 by permission of the British Standards Institution, 2 Park Street, London, W. 1. My thanks are due to the United Steel Company Limited for permission to reproduce Fig. 15 and the relevant curves in Fig. 42, to Professor Richardson for Fig. 8 and to Mr. J. M. Middleton for Fig. 41. I thank Mr. F. LeServe, Mr. R. Chadwick and Mr. Ridsdale for showing an active interest in this work. Mr. C. Wough kindly made the rough sketches for Figs. 22 and 25.

As with the manuscript of my previous book, Pergamon Press carried out the final drawings from the very rough freehand sketches of the diagrams I submitted. I am greatly indebted to them for giving me this invaluable assistance.

A.D.S.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses the basic function of a mould. The basic function of a mould is to provide a cavity that would receive liquid metal to produce a casting of a desired shape and size when the metal cools by solidification. A core is a solid object that is inserted in the mould cavity so that metal flows around it and, upon solidification, the casting is devoid of metal in the part occupied by the core initially in the mould cavity. Moulds can be permanent moulds, such as those used in die casting and expendable ones, such as those produced from refractory aggregates. The permanent moulds can be used many times whereas the latter expendable moulds must be constructed separately each time a casting is to be produced. Permanent moulds are usually metal moulds and possibly the only permanent mould material used to receive steel is grey or nodular cast iron such as ingot moulds. The chapter highlights the main requirements of a mould or core material.

The basic function of a mould is to provide a cavity which would receive liquid metal to produce a casting of a desired shape and size when the metal cools by solidification. A core is a solid object which is inserted in the mould cavity so that metal flows around it and, upon solidification, the casting is devoid of metal in the part occupied by the core initially in the mould cavity.

Moulds can be permanent moulds such as those used in die-casting and expendable ones such as those produced from refractory aggregates. The permanent moulds can be used many times whereas the latter expendable moulds must be constructed separately each time a casting is to be produced. Permanent moulds are usually metal moulds and possibly the only permanent mould material used to receive steel is grey or nodular cast iron such as ingot moulds. However, steel ingots produced in steelworks from ingot moulds do not, by usage, come under the category of castings, and a steel foundry is essentially that branch of engineering where shaped components are produced by using moulds and/or cores. The basis material for these are some refractory particles such as silica sand.

The various forms of mould and core making methods have been described elsewhere,* and the main requirements of a mould or core material are that:

(1) It must be amenable to shaping processes such as by ramming around patterns and in core boxes;

(2) The rammed structures must be able to retain their shapes and rigidity once constructed until the metal cast in the mould has formed a strong solidified skin.

That is, the material must flow readily for compaction and the refractory particles such as silica sand grains must be held together by some bonding medium. Consider the sand grains as spherical in shape like billiard balls. When two such particles are brought together they simply touch at the points of contact, but little or no force is required to separate the grains (Fig. 1a). However, if a bonding medium is shared by the two grains near the point of contact (Fig. 1b), an appreciable force would be necessary to separate the grains.

FIG. 1 Two sand grains.

(a) Without bond. (b) With bond.

The bonding medium in a moulding material is distributed around the grains so that, as far as possible, the particulate matters are completely coated by the bonding agent. This is necessary because, since a mould involves the use of many sand grains, no matter how the particulate matters are oriented, there will always be an amount of bond available at all points of contact ensuring uniform strength at all parts in the compacted mould. The distribution of the bonding agent around the sand grains is effected by mixing or milling the refractory particles with the bonding medium in sand mills.

The various types of bonds employed in the steel foundry are:

(1) Clay bond.

(2) Oil and organic bond.

(3) Thermosetting resin bond.

(4) Air-setting bond.

(5) Sodium silicate bond.

(6) Ethyl-silicate bond.

The most widely used basis material in formulating mould and core materials for the steel foundry is silica sand together with some non-siliceous materials such as zircon and chromite.

The basis refractory aggregates have maximum flowability which diminishes as the silica sand is mixed with the bonding agent. However, the moulds as prepared must have adequate strengths, i.e. a definite amount of bonding agent must be present. The amount of bond is optimized so that the moulds have adequate strengths without a drastic loss of flowability.

The mould material is prepared in a sand mill which is only a part of the whole sand plant system described in Chapter 7. To obtain satisfactory castings, it is necessary that each batch of mould material is tested to ensure consistent properties. The probable strengths of moulds are expressed by measuring the compressive strengths of samples in the laboratory. A measure of flowability is by knowing the shatter index value which allows a compacted specimen to fall through a height. If the specimen breaks into small individual grains the mould material has maximum flowability with no bond and zero shatter index. Since there must be an optimum bond and a good flowability, a certain value of the shatter index is regarded as the optimum. Moulds are also used in the dry state for higher strength than that obtained from green moulds and dry compressive strengths are measured. Certain core materials such as oil- and silicate-bonded sands have very high strengths, and tensile strengths are used in these cases for property control tests. A further parameter measured is the transverse strength. As liquid steel enters the mould, gases are evolved. The sources for the gaseous matters may be steam when the mould is green, i.e. not dried or the volatilization of carbonaceous matters such as in oil- or organic-bonded core materials. These gases must be extracted from the mould–core interfaces through the body of the compacted materials, otherwise the gases will be trapped in the casting giving gross defects. Although venting channels are provided in cores while constructed, there should be voids between the adjacent sand grains to allow the gases to permeate out of the cores into the atmosphere. The amount of voids present is measured by noting the permeability of the mould

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