In this study, Taguchi method is used to find out the effect of micro alloying elements like vanadium, niobium and titanium on the hardness and tensile strength of the normalized cast steel. Based on this method, plan of experiments were made by using orthogonal arrays to acquire the data on hardness and tensile strength. The signal to noise ratio and analysis of variance (ANOVA) are used to investigate the effect of these micro alloying elements on these two mechanical properties of the micro alloyed normalized cast steel. The results indicated that in the micro alloyed normalized cast steel both these properties increases when compared to non-micro-alloyed normalized cast steel. The effect of niobium addition was found to be significantly higher to obtain higher hardness and tensile strength when compared to other micro alloying elements. The maximum hardness of 200HV and the maximum tensile strength of 780 N/mm2 were obtained in 0.05%Nb addition micro alloyed normalized cast steel. Micro-alloyed with niobium normalized cast steel have the finest and uniform microstructure and fine pearlite colonies distributed uniformly in the ferrite. The optimum condition to obtain higher hardness and tensile strength were determined. The results were verified with experiments.
Metal casting process involves processes such as pattern making, moulding and melting etc. Casting defects occur due to combination of various processes even though efforts are taken to control them. The first step in the defect analysis is to identify the major casting defect among the many casting defects. Then the analysis is to be made to find the root cause of the particular defect. Moreover, it is especially difficult to identify the root causes of the defect. Therefore, a systematic method is required to identify the root cause of the defect among possible causes, consequently specific remedial measures have to be implemented to control them. This paper presents a systematic procedure to identify the root cause of shrinkage defect in an automobile body casting (SG 500/7) and control it by the application of Pareto chart and Ishikawa diagram. with quantitative Weightage. It was found that the root causes were larger volume section in the cope, insufficient feeding of riser and insufficient poured metal in the riser. The necessary remedial measures were taken and castings were reproduced. The shrinkage defect in the castings was completely eliminated.
Energy conservation is an important step to overcome the energy crisis and prevent environmental pollution. Casting industry is a major consumer of energy among all the industries. The distribution of electrical energy consumed in all the departments of the foundry is presented. Nearly 70% of the energy is consumed especially in the melting department alone. Production of casting involves number of process variables. Even though lot of efforts has been taken to prevent defects, it occurs in the casting due to variables present in the process. This paper focuses the energy saving by improving the casting yield and by reducing the rejections. Furthermore an analysis is made on power consumption for melting in the induction furnace to produce defective castings and improvement in the casting yield. The energy consumed to produce defective castings in all other departments is also presented. This analysis reveals that without any further investment in the foundry, it is possible to save 3248.15 kWh of energy by reducing the rejections as well as by improving the casting yield. The redesign of the feeding system and the reduced major rejection shrinkage in the body casting improved the casting yield from 56% to 72% and also the effective yield from 12.89% to 66.80%.