J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2012, 28(10), 946950.

A Novel Process in Semi-Solid Metal Casting

Bijan Abbasi-Khazaei and Saeid Ghaderi
Department of Material Eng., Faculty of Eng., Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran
[Manuscript received December 7, 2011, in revised form April 21, 2012]

In this research a new process for semi-solid casting of ductile iron based on the high nucleation rate combined with locally mechanical stirring is presented. In this process at rst fully liquid ductile iron was poured on the peripheral surface of a wheel rotating against pouring direction. At this stage, the solid crystals nucleated at the chilling surface were pushed to the melt by a heat resistance steel cutter and nally the semi-solid slurry was generated. Reheating treatment was done on the samples to achieve more eciency of semi-solid casting process. The eects of the travelling distance of solid particles during casting, the reheating time and temperature were examined. The results showed that the process eectively changes the dendrite structure to globular one. KEY WORDS: Semi-solid; Casting; Ductile cast iron

1. Introduction The process of semi-solid casting oers a number of advantages such as improved mechanical properties, good surface nish, and low segregation and so on. The key to the process is to obtain semisolid slurry free of dendrite, with the solid being present as non-agglomerated, ne and spherical particles, and with minimum entrapped liquid in the solid. The semi-solid slurries are obtainable by a number of methods with and without liquid agitation such as single slug production method, low superheat casting, low superheat pouring with a shear eld, swirled enthalpy equilibration device process, cooling slop, twin roll casting equipped with a cooling slope, and partial melting. As demonstrated by Hirt and Koop[1] , using the single slug production method, a magnetic eld caused stirring of the molten mass. The growing dendrite structure was destroyed by shear forces generated by the ow and the slurries were created. In the low superheat casting process, a slightly superheated melt is poured directly into the die; the seed of the crystals are generated at the die surface
Corresponding author. Assist. Prof., Ph.D.; Tel.: +98 831 8369655; Fax: +98 831 4283263; E-mail address: biabkh@yahoo.com (B. Abbasi-Khazaei).

and the casting is carried out before the crystal seeds could be re-melted[2] . By this method shallow temperature gradient removes directional heat extraction from the melt and prevents the formation of dendrites and the semi-solid slurry is created. The process of low superheat pouring with a shear eld, used solidication conditions to control nucleation, nuclei survival and grain growth by means of low superheat pouring, vigorous mixing and rapid cooling during the initial stage of solidication, combined with a much slower cooling thereafter. The swirled enthalpy equilibration device process, involves two main steps, at rst the heat is extracted to achieve the desired liquid-solid mixture and then excessive liquid is drained to produce a self-supporting semi-solid slug that is formed under pressure[3] . The principal is based on achieving rapid thermal equilibrium between the metallic container and the bulk of the metal by proper process parameter selection such as pouring temperature, eccentric mechanical stirring and drainage of a portion of eutectic liquid. For the cooling slope method, the slurries are made by the simple process of pouring the slightly superheated melt down a cooling slope with subsequent solidication in a die[4] . Granular crystals nucleate and grow on the slope and are washed away from the surface by uid motion. The melt, containing a large

B. Abbasi-Khazaei et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2012, 28(10), 946950.

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number of nuclei crystals, solidies in the die, and results in a ne globular microstructure. For the twin roll casting method, at rst a molten metal is poured on the cooling slope, the melt becomes a semisolid, owing into a preheated nozzle and being dragged by a twin roll caster machine. The method was used for strip casting of aluminum by Haga[5] and magnesium alloys by Watari et al.[6] . Slow casting speed, using a lubricant in order to prevent the sticking of the strip to the roll, and coating of the cooling sloop can be considered as disadvantages of this method. In partial melting process, the solid alloy is heated so that recrystallization takes place before the semi-solid temperature range is reached; at temperatures above solidus line, liquid wetting at newly formed grain boundaries leads to a spheroidized microstructure[7] . Most of these processes make use of the high nucleation rate associated with low-temperature casting and chill cooling, but destroying dendrite by shear forces and other principles are also used. Although the potential of semi-solid processing is already wellknown, the industrial production of semi-solid material with high melting point such as steels and irons has some limitations because of technological problems, mostly due to the higher process temperature. The problem is more complicated for ductile iron because of inoculants fading at more casting time. There are a few researches about semisolid casting of ductile irons[810] . Nili-Ahmadabadi et al. recently used cooling slope method to produce slurry of ductile iron[8] . The optimum graphite nodularity and solid particle globularity were obtained at sloped plate angle of 7.5 and length of 560 mm with a cooling rate of 67 Ks1 without inoculant fading. It seems that at the mentioned plate angle, the low casting speed and subsequently low productivity of this method in mass production could be questioned. In the present study a new process based on the high nucleation rate combined with locally mechanical stirring is presented for preparing semisolid slurry of high melting point material such as ductile iron. The method is easy and fast, with no coating of the surface due to rapid ow of heat without any sticking of the solidied metals to the surface. 2. Experimental 2.1 Melt preparation Ductile cast iron with the chemical composition shown in Table 1 was treated in a crucible furnace. Magnesium was added by using the sandwich method with 2%FeSiMg as inoculant and then 75% FeSi was used as post inoculant. 2.2 Semi-solid casting Fig. 1 shows a schematic illustration of the exper-

Table 1 Chemical composition of ductile iron (wt%) C 3.1 Si 2.2 Mn 0.98 Mg 0.05 S 0.005 P 0.015 Fe Bal.

Fig. 1 Schematic representation of the semi-solid process

imental apparatus, and Table 2 shows the experimental conditions and specications of the wheel. Molten metal at 1300 C was cast on the top surface of the rotating wheel in opposite direction of melt pouring. A large number of solidied nucleis were created at the surface and some of them were washed away from the surface by uid motion. This stage is similar to the cooling sloop method. A cutter made by heatresisting tools steel at the top of the wheel was used for locally mechanical stirring and diattaching of the remained solidied nuclies; this stage is similar to the methods based on mechanical stirring of the molten metals, and nally the melt became slurry and owed into the die. It should be mentioned that the wheel was air cooled with no additional instruments for cooling. In order to investigate the eect of apparatus parameters, the cutter was positioned at the four traveling distances of 4, 5, 7 and 8 cm (length of OA in Fig. 1). 2.3 Reheating temperature and time For the reheating, samples were cut from casts prepared using the optimum processing condition obtained at the traveling distance of 8 cm. The samples were reheated in a resistance furnace with a controlled atmosphere at the temperatures of 1150, 1165, 1175, 1185 and 1197 C for 5 to 20 min holding time and followed by air cooling. An optical microscope equipped with an image analyzer was used to study the volume fraction and morphology of the solid particles. Aspect ratio of the grains was measured as dmax /dmin , where dmax and dmin are maximum and minimum diameter of the grains.

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B. Abbasi-Khazaei et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2012, 28(10), 946950.

Table 2 Experimental conditions Wheel Mould Molten metal Cutter Traveling distance of solid particles (length of OA in Fig. 1) 4, 5, 7 and 8 cm

Diameter: 22 cm; Material: sand; Temperature: 1300 C; Material: heat Width: 10 cm; Temp.: 25 C; Weight: 60 kg; resisting tools steel Material: brass 7030, Dimension: Material: ductile iron self cooling, non-coating; 200 mm100 mm55 mm Temperature just after casting: 60 C; Speed: 75 rev./min

Fig. 2 Dendritic structure of ductile iron by normal casting

3. Results and Discussion 3.1 Semi-solid casting Fig. 2 shows the microstructure of the normal

casted ductile iron, which is mainly dendritic. Microstructures of semi-solid casted ductile iron with dierent traveling distance of solidied particles are shown in Figs. 3. As can be seen the structure of the grains in all cases are globular and their size and globularity change as the traveling distance increases. The variation of the count, size, and the aspect ratio of the grains are shown in Fig. 4. It is shown that as the traveling distance rises, the grain size and the aspect ratio decrease because of more heat transfer and more primary solid nucleation due to more stirring time which resulted in more grain count. Results show that, at the traveling distances of 4, 5, 7 and 8 cm, the hardness of the casts are 18.5, 21, 24 and 26 HRC, respectively. The increase of the hardness to respect of traveling distance can be attributed to more fraction of pearlite. 3.2 Reheating For optimizing the time and temperature of re-

Fig. 3 Optical micrographs of semi-solid ductile iron at traveled distance: (a) 4 cm, (b) 5 cm, (c) 7 cm and (d) 8 cm

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(a)

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90 80
m Grain size /

(b)

2.2

(c)

Grain count / (N/mm )

10

2.0

Aspect ratio
4 5 6 7 8

70 60 50 40 30 4 5 6 7 8

1.8

1.6

1.4

4
1.2

1.0 4 5 6 7 8

Traveling distance / cm

Traveling distance / cm

Traveling distance / cm

Fig. 4 Variation of size (a), count (b) and aspect ratio (c) of the grains

Fig. 5 Eect of reheating at of 1165 C for dierent time: (a) 5 min, (b) 10 min, (c) 15 min and (d) 20 min

heating, a series of samples obtained at the traveling distance of 8 cm were reheated at temperatures of 1150, 1165, 1175, 1185 and 1197 C for 5, 10, 15 and 20 min, respectively. Fig. 5 shows the microstructure of reheated semisolid cast ductile iron for dierent holding time. As it can be seen, at the holding time of 5 min, the liquid is formed only at the corner of the grain boundaries because of their low melting points. At the reheating time of 10 min, the most grain boundaries become liquid but the primary solid nodules remain unchanged. At the holding time of 15 min, the shape of the primary solids gradually changes to spherical and the rounded islands are created. With increasing holding time to 20 min and more, liquid fraction and solid globularity change slightly. The liquid fractions are graphically calculated and its variation vs holding time is shown in Fig. 6. As it can be seen, the liquid frac-

0.5

0.4

Liquid fraction

0.3

0.2

0.1

0.0 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

Reheating time / min

Fig. 6 Calculated liquid fraction vs reheating time at 1165 C

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B. Abbasi-Khazaei et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2012, 28(10), 946950.

Fig. 7 Eect of reheating temperatures on the microstructures: (a) 1150 C, (b) 1165 C, (c) 1175 C, (d) 1185 C, (e) 1197 C and (f) aspect ratio of the primary solid at the holding time of 15 min

tion rises as holding time increases and approximately reaches a steady state after 15 min. Fig. 5 shows that, the time of 15 min can be selected as optimum reheating time for all holding temperatures, when, the rounded islands are surrounded by the minimum of stabilized liquid fraction. Some dark laths can be seen in Fig. 5(c) which are martensite and bainite (marked with M and B). The eect of reheating temperatures on the microstructures at the optimum reheating time is shown in Fig. 7. The temperature of 1150 C is not sucient to obtain desired semi-solid mixture because of insucient liquid fraction and non spherical shape of primary solids. At the other hand at the temperatures of 1175, 1185 and 1197 C, the liquid fraction in semi-solid mixture notably rises which is undesirable due to further solidication with dendritic structure. In addition, at the temperature more than 1185 C, the graphite nodules and the solid grains agglomerate and reduce because of more stability. So it can be concluded that the optimum reheating temperature in this wrok is 1165 C. 4. Conclusion In this research a new process for semi-solid casting of alloys especially for high melting point materials such as steel and iron is presented. The proposed process is based simultaneously on the mixed mechanism of breaking dendrites and nucleation and the

growth of granular crystals. The process is applied in the semi-solid casting of ductile iron. The optimized duration was achieved at traveling distance of 8 cm. The optimum reheating condition was attained at the temperature of 1165 C for 15 min.
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