Cover Story
Investment Casting in a Box: Opens Door to the Future
by Erin Almaleh, Editor, INCAST Magazine
the team at the Investment Casting Institute. “How will we fill our companies with skilled labor as more and more of our staff retires?” “How do we close the gap between our seasoned employees and newly hired graduates?” And ultimately, at the core of these questions... “How do we expose and attract a new generation to the world of investment casting?” As we prepared for landing in Grand Rapids, I hoped I
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was headed toward some answers. I had been invited to the Senior Design Engineering Conference at Western Michigan University where graduating seniors showcase their capstone projects to illustrate what they’ve learned. This semester, three students, Kevin Greer, Elie Chahine and Victoria Urquhart designed an Investment Casting “In a Box” in an attempt to streamline the manufacturing process and expose students to the metal casting technology. I was excited to see their presentation.
The Challenge The parameters of the senior project would not be an easy task. “The key goal of the project was to demonstrate the investment casting process during a university lab, so our target was to limit this to three hours. To do this, we needed to optimize the time required to create the ceramic shells, since those can take 12-16 hours in industry applications. Of course, safety was a top priority, as well. We needed to develop a safe way to move the crucible in and out of the coil of our induction furnace, so we designed and fabricated a lift mechanism. Other parameters included the ideas that our process design should be portable and functional to produce a real investment casting with no gimmicks,” Kevin Greer explained.
The Research “After learning all about investment casting through research and from discussion with our adviser, Dr. Sam Ramrattan, we were given the opportunity to tour Eagle Precision in Muskegon, MI. During this tour, we saw, first hand, the various steps required in order to complete an investment cast part. At the end of the tour, a sample of investment casting wax was donated to us to use for testing purposes. Several slurry mixtures were tested and the best one was chosen. An induction furnace and box oven were donated from the WMU Foundry. After several trial runs and calculations, an optimal
24 ❘ December 2018 ®
lying out to Michigan on a cold Monday morning, my head was filled with questions. Questions I’ve heard posed from ICI Members time and time again since joining
Above (left to right): WMU Faculty Advisor, Dr. Sam Ramrattan, Elie Chahine, Victoria Urquhart and Kevin Greer, WMU mechanical engineering students
procedure was created and the casting system was secured onto a cart in order to allow for a more portable unit,” Elie Chahine stated.
The Presentation Assuming that an audience would not know about investment casting, the students began their presentation with a basic history lesson of investment casting... some 6000 years ago. “I am personally drawn to the complexities that investment casting can show. It was interesting to find out that investment casting dates back about 6000 years and to see what some of the earliest castings look like, comparing to current investment castings shows how far we have come,” Victoria Urquhart stated. Over the next 1/2 hour, the students took turns and
explained each choice they made developing their project. “We evaluated the equipment we had available from the WMU foundry to melt casting metal and cure the ceramic shells. We also researched numerous alternative materials for the plastic pattern and the ceramic. A huge chunk of time on this project was spent testing these material alternative and making those decisions to get us under our three hour limit,” Greer said.
The Motivation After the students were finished, I was eager to see their equipment for myself. We headed down to the foundry and
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