| 1. |
- Zhang, Qing
(författare)
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Mechanical properties of semi-solid Al castings : Role of stirring
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Aluminum castings have been widely used in the automotive industry to reduce the vehicle's weight. However, the existence of casting defects significantly limits its application. The most common and detrimental defects in aluminum castings are porosity and oxides. The formation of the pores comes from the solute hydrogen and volumetric reduction during the solidification process, resulting in the gas and shrinkage pores, respectively. The oxides can be introduced by either the operation during the process or the originally existing oxides in the melt. To reduce these defects, optimizing the casting process and controlling the melt quality is essential.In this work, the Semisolid Metal (SSM) process was used as it can significantly reduce the formation of shrinkage pores. The main focuses were on the influence of stirring intensity on the formation of casting defects and, thus, the resultant mechanical properties. In addition, to control the original melt quality, particularly the amount of oxides, efforts were made to develop proper methods for the melt quality assessment.The results show that the slurry-making process, mainly through stirring intensity, can affect the casting defects significantly. On the one hand, the increasing stirring intensity can distribute the primary Al particles more homogeneously, reducing the pores in terms of size and number by increasing the permeability during the solidification process. On the other hand, the increasing stirring intensity can affect the size of oxides differently, depending on the composition, for instance, the Mg content.For the alloys with sufficient Mg, the oxides would be MgAl2O4, which are small films with numerous cracks. Under intensive stirring, the oxides can break down into small oxide particles. As a result, intensive stirring can improve ductility by reducing the formation of big pores. However, the oxides would mainly be Al2O3 films for alloys with low Mg content. In this case, the current stirring intensity is insufficient to break the oxide films. Instead, the increased stirring has introduced more oxide films into the melt. Consequently, in the casting with intensive stirring, the increasing oxide films dominated the ductility rather than the reduced porosity.The SSM castings exhibit better bending fatigue properties than the casting using the traditional high-pressure die casting (HPDC) process. This improvement is mainly due to the formation of the harder surface liquid segregation (SLS) layer on the SSM casting surface. Furthermore, compared with the standard SSM process, the castings using intensive stirring (hereinafter referred to as the modified SSM process) show similar but more reliable fatigue properties. This reliable fatigue property can be attributed to eliminating the big internal pores through intensive stirring, which results in local stress concentration and significantly reduces fatigue performance. Besides, due to the gradient stress distribution in the bending loading, the surface defects play a significant role in the fatigue properties. With the increase of the specimens’ thickness, the failure mechanisms changed.The shrinkage pores in the reduced pressure test (RPT) test play a significant role in the accuracy of melt quality assessment. A good correlation between the bifilm index (BI)/ density index (DI) and hydrogen content is observed for the RPT samples without significant shrinkage pores. In addition, the correlation between the BI and elongation is also strongly affected by the clusters of shrinkage pores due to the conflict between the definition of the BI and the influence of clusters of shrinkage pores on the ductility. Based on this, we proposed an optimized BI where the clusters of shrinkage pores were treated as single pores, increasing the reliability of the correlation between the BI and elongation.
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| 2. |
- Razaz, Ghadir
(författare)
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Problems in the Aluminium DC Casting Process Associated with Melt Treatment Operations
- 2019
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The quality of DC cast Al alloys is highly dependent on melt batch composition and impurity level in the molten alloy. The chemical composition and cleanliness of a melt is controlled through the melt treatment operations, carried out while the melt is still in the furnace before casting starts. The present work has studied some of these operations and associated problems such as slow dissolution of alloying elements, non-reproducibility in chemical composition analysis and inclusions. The results of the dissolution of the alloy elements Mn and Fe showed different behaviors. For Mn three intermediate phases were involved, all of which exhibited a smooth interface between Mn and the liquid. These three phases were identified as the γ2, Al11Mn4, and µ phases, which grow slowly towards the dissolving Mn particles. The results from the Fe dissolution revealed that only one phase dominates the process, Al5Fe2, which penetrates the Fe particles with an irregular interface.The interaction between Mn and Ti additions to AA3003 alloys and consequences for the solidification and precipitation behavior was investigated. The study could map the limits for formation of an earlier unknown AlMnTi phase, which formed large particles, detrimental for subsequent rolling operations.Different sampling procedures for chemical composition analysis were studied, and a novel approach was proposed. A mould with an insulated periphery provided one-dimensional solidification, which gave compositions close to nominal. Inclusion distributions along as-cast billets were studied as a function of different holding times, and thus different grades of sedimentation. Holding times longer than 30 minutes did not show any improvements. It was also shown that if melt remaining in the furnace at end of casting is less than about 3000 kg, the sedimented inclusions are stirred into the bulk again, and can enter into the end of the billet.The impact on hot tearing susceptibility of different Cu and Fe contents for AA3000 alloys was studied. Cu contents in a range from 0.3 to 1.2 wt% significantly increase the hot tearing tendency, which was attributed to bad feeding at end of solidification. Decreasing of the Fe content below 0.2 wt%, gives a strong cracking tendency, owing to decreased precipitations of the Al6(Mn,Fe) phase, which contributes to early bridging and thus reinforcement between grains.
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