Foundry, and Sovia, Shaughnessy, Habenicht and the rest of the group are following those numbers to make a better casting. Steadily, they are chipping away at scrap rates—a major hurdle in achieving their goal of being an efficient producer of engi- neered components. One of the first casting projects
AC Foundry undertook on its quest for complex castings—the Volvo catalyzed exhaust pipe—now runs through the sand casting facility as efficiently as any of the company’s old trinket castings. “Porosity is now at 3.5%,” Sovia
said. “It took a lot of experimenta- tion because this was a gas issue, and I couldn’t run a simulation for that. For a month, I was interrupting produc- tion every day so I could get samples to try to figure out a solution.” Te water jacketed aluminum pipe
is universal to three engine platforms and weighs 12.1 lbs., 38 lbs. less than its catalyzed cast iron counterpart. Te final design features just two core prints that require plugging in the assembly process. Te oxygen sensor boss was redesigned to minimize the amount of aluminum in the isolated heavy section. Gating was incorpo- rated into the cores. “It was a tough development process,
but now that we completed it, we have a unique environmental innovation that gives us an advantage in the marine market that no one else has,” said John Marsh, project manager and engineering administrator at Volvo Penta.
Devil in the Details After realizing the power of track-
ing key process variables, AC Found- ry’s team began seeing factors affecting production that should be monitored in other areas, including mold temper- ature and the devices meant to control and monitor mold temperature. “In April 2011, we had an oil pan
with a 33% scrap rate,” said Ron Davis, permanent mold process engineer. “So we set thermocouples on the mold [to track temperature] and were able to find the optimal temperature for pour- ing.” But after time, the thermocou- ple’s wires would become brittle and break, skewing the temperature data.
42 | MODERN CASTING March 2012
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