Leonard, vice president, Aristo-Cast. “Right away the gating for the seat frame worked.” Traditionally, aerospace seat
frames are made from aluminum using a few different techniques: “Te 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.”
Te size of the seat frame was too
large for a metal printing buildbox, so this was a chance to see how the approach 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 can provide not just samples but produc- tion volumes, as well. “Investment casting is bringing the
MEDIA RESOURCE
To see a photo gallery of all the excellent casting designs submitted to this year’s competition, visit
www.metalcastingdesign.com.
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 files to Aristo Cast, which made some adjustments to the design in order to optimize it for the investment casting process:“Te 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,
Aristo-Cast successfully cast the unique seat frame. Autodesk calculates that the weight
reduction of the magnesium frame would achieve annual fuel savings of 63 tons for an Airbus A380 that holds 615 seats. Based on current costs for jet fuel, average annual savings per aircraft could be $103,324 and life of service savings (20 years) would be over $2 million per plane. A fleet of 100 aircrafts would achieve annual fuel savings of more than $206 million. “Tere is a huge amount of excite-
ment around these high-performance structures with metal printing, but we see an interesting opportunity for foundry markets to engage in using 3-D techniques for making patterns and molds,” Bastian said. “It shows we can realize the same value from direct metal printing with a technology like metalcasting that is very well under- stood, very familiar, and offers a huge portfolio of materials that in many cases are already qualified for aerospace. Te foundry industry is in an excit- ing spot to capitalize on the advanced design technologies to realize tremen- dous value very quickly.”
May 2017 MODERN CASTING | 27
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