Because of its unique advantages on energy savings and casting complex shapes, Lost Foam Casting (LFC) has been widely used as a replacement to the conventional techniques (sand and investment castings). In order to continuously improve the quality of the Lost Foam Casting process for reducing scrap rate and increasing energy savings, the US Department of Energy sponsored the present study to develop new characterization techniques for enhancing the understanding of the fundamental properties of the refractory materials used in the Lost Foam Casting process. In this study, new techniques are proposed to characterize the refractory materials' properties such as particle size, particle shape, rheological behavior, transport properties, microstructure, thickness, as well as packing properties. The microstructure information obtained from the proposed technique is found to be well correlated with the transport properties of the porous coating materials. A procedure using a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics code is developed to simulate experimental gas flow data for solving complex boundary value problems. In this study, the effects of dilution and dispersion on the coating properties such as transport properties and microstructures are also investigated. Results show that the dilution and dispersion have opposing influences on the pore size and transport properties. In addition, this study also includes another part of the permeability system, the un-bonded granular materials used in the Lost Foam Casting process. A three-dimensional (3-D) computer program is developed to simulate the packing behavior of granular materials at a loose state using a "drop and roll" method. This study provides a systematic characterization of the LFC refractory coating slurries, dried refractory coating, and the granular media. This study also demonstrates the application of proposed characterization techniques for coating quality control using statistical process control charts. In addition, numerical models are also developed to predict the coating performance such as its coating thickness and transport properties. The results from this study are likely to have a significant impact on improving the Lost Foam Casting process. The characterization tools developed in this study are being currently used in a large Lost Foam Casting foundry for improving the process at production scale.
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