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2013
Presentation
Titel
Serial production of cellular structures - no additives allowed!
Titel Supplements
Presentation held at 8th International Conference on Porous Metals and Metallic Foams, METFOAM 2013, June 23rd to 26th, 2013, Raleigh, NC
Abstract
As reported during the last years the Lightweight design department of the Fraunhofer-IWU is collaborating with several foundries. The projects reach from energy management up to product development and include technology research as well. Especially in high pressure die casting most of the products are material minimized till the edge of the castability. The wall thickness is decreased to the possible extreme, holes are integrated and structures created by topology optimization pushing this traditional industrial sector to the newest state of technology. Many attempts have been published trying to combine that high level serial production technology with the cellular structures. But till now none of them is dealing with serial die casting parts. Usually the geometry of the parts needs to be adapted to the requirements of the pore generation procedure, the technology is rather complex and in some cases the invested energy, time and additives consume the savings reached by the pore integration. The intention of the project is based upon the omnipresent resource efficiency. By intensive technological investigation of the state of the art and several practical test series almost all published strategies of pore generation in high pressure die casting have been analyzed. The industrial partner of the project rejected all of the current approaches as irrelevant for serial application forcing us to create new ideas. The material savings in focus the aim was below the common foam structures at around 20-25%. By changing the die-casting-machine setup and several parameters the first parts in original geometry have been realized reaching the target of material reduction. Mostly homogenous pores have been integrated in parts with a wall thickness of below 3 mm while the outer shell is completely closed and no visual differences compared to the conventionally produced parts occur.