Autodesk calculates the cast magnesium seat frame could save airlines millions of dollars in fuel savings.
ing how to use the model for other manufacturing methods. Metalcasting was a natural choice because additive technology can be used to make the patterns and tooling. To gain interest from aerospace and
automotive customers, Autodesk sought to make samples of parts produced in the generatively-designed lattice structure and calculate the potential savings, which led to Aristo-Cast. “I had been researching the casting
space for a little over a year and it became clear Aristo-Cast was a pretty unique operation and experience with the level of complexity we were interested in,” said Andreas Bastian, principal research scientist for Autodesk. “T ey work with magnesium, which was very interesting to us because it is about 35% lighter than aluminum and can’t yet be printed, so that was an added value.” Aristo-Cast is one of fewer than
10 investment casting facilities in the world that regularly casts magnesium. Although the lattice structure in aluminum will also achieve weight and
costs savings, creating it in magnesium multiplies the savings signifi cantly. “Autodesk was looking for samples
and we have learned a lot throughout the years about how to gate mag- nesium versus aluminum,” said Paul Leonard, vice president, Aristo-Cast. “Right away the gating for the seat frame worked.” Traditionally, aerospace seat
frames are made from aluminum us- ing a few different techniques: “T e lightest ones currently on the
market are CNC machined from a solid billet, meaning there is a lot of material wasted,” Harris said. “Some are cast or made from an assembly and cost less, but they are heavier.” T e size of the seat frame was too
large for a metal printing buildbox, so this was a chance to see how the ap- proach would work for 3-D printing patterns for metalcasting. Aristo-Cast has two 3-D printing machines with build boxes each large enough to print 30 of the seat frame patterns at a time. With 60 patterns printed at a time, Aristo-Cast
22 | METAL CASTING DESIGN & PURCHASING | May/Jun 2017
can provide not just samples but produc- tion volumes, as well. “Investment casting is bringing the best of both current techniques and giving us the high performance and light weight we’re looking for while only using the material we need,” said Andy Harris, a design consultant for Autodesk’s DMG group. “It enables the scale of production when a few thousand parts are needed and allows the strength of additive manufacturing to be applied to investment casting.” After designing the seat frame,
Autodesk provided the fi les to Aristo- Cast, which made some adjustments to the design in order to optimize it for the investment casting process:“T e initial design was so thin in areas we couldn’t print the patterns,” Leonard said. “So we had to add thickness to certain sections.” After the minor adjustment, Aris- to-Cast successfully cast the unique seat frame. Autodesk calculates that the weight reduction of the magnesium frame
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