New Delhi (The Hawk): Researchers have developed a manufacturing process for steel alloy powder that can act as a tool for developing efficient cooling channels for pressure die casting. This can help improve the tool service life, quality of cast parts and reduce number of rejections during the casting process.
Pressure die casting is used to manufacture devices ranging from medical devices to industrial equipment. Manufacturing of die tools with efficient cooling channels by conventional processes for Pressure Die Casting (PDC) have been challenging. In conventional manufacturing, the die tools are designed with compromised straight-line cooling channels.
A team of researchers at the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI) has developed an additive manufacturing process for a steel alloy powder called AISI H13 which can act as a tool material for efficient cooling channels or conformal cooling channels (CC) for pressure die casting (PDC). Such CC systems show great promise to substitute conventional cooling systems as the former can provide more uniform and efficient cooling effects and thus improve the production quality and efficiency significantly. The additive manufacturing process offers the freedom to give any desired shape to the cooling channels so that they can carry out the cooling efficiently. The research has been published in the Transactions of the Indian National Academy of Engineering
The additive manufacturing process in which ARCI, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has acquired considerable expertise, opens a new world of design innovation that previously was impossible to achieve by the conventional manufacturing process. ARCI has emerged as a nationally important center for metal additive manufacturing (AM) by establishing powder bed fusion-based selective laser melting (SLM) and electron beam melting (EBM) additive manufacturing facilities. The researchers have used their expertise in the AM-SLM method in this manufacturing process.