Industry News
Admatec and Aristo-Cast Jointly Present New Pattern-Less Investment Casting Process with Additive Manufacturing
In 2017, Aristo-Cast started working
with the Admaflex 130 ceramic 3D printer to develop a new process that would revolutionize the traditional investment casting process. The Admaflex 130 3D printer was developed in 2012 by Admatec. “We’ve been working with the
Admaflex 130+ Ceramic 3D printer for approximately 18 months. During this time we have developed a process allowing us to revolutionize the investment casting process,” Jack Ziemba, CEO at Aristo-Cast. The conventional method of
creating investment casting consists of either injecting or 3D printing a pattern that is invested in a ceramic coating to create a ceramic shell. The pattern is then burned out from the ceramic, leaving a cavity that will be filled with
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the alloy of choice to produce a close tolerance casting.
Challenges of Conventional Investment Casting (IC) Process The conventional IC process is very labor intensive and time consuming and takes anywhere from two to as many as ten days to create a shell that is ready for casting. The shell is created by dipping the pattern in a liquid slurry and subsequently drying each coat before adding the next of as many as 8 coats to complete the shell. The first coating is the most critical due to the fact that it’s the determining factor of the fine detail and surface finish you can achieve on the final product. A pattern with complex cores or passages is the most challenging to dip due to the inability to verify the integrity of the coat
and the difficulty in determining when the coat is sufficiently dry to allow the application of the next coat.
The New Process Developed with the Admaflex 130 With the Admaflex 130 it is possible to directly print the shell thus eliminating the need for a costly injection mold or a costly 3D printed pattern. This means that Aristo-Cast is able to remove five steps of the traditional process, including: Step 1: Creation of pattern Step 2: Cluster pattern Step 4: Stucco coat forming Step 5: Dewax shell mold Furthermore, printing the shell
directly from a cad file eliminates the doubt of what the surface detail looks like and allows the inspection of intricate core passages before the alloy is poured. The
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