Metal casting is a very efficient process of manufacturing components used in the aerospace, automotive, chemical, energy, healthcare, and consumer products industries. Current design of metal castings in industries often results in non-uniform material properties, where the strength of the part or component may vary throughout the piece. This is often compensated for by the over-design of materials to ensure a minimum strength, and can result in unnecessary waste of materials and manufacturing time. This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project seeks to develop computational and experimental tools to build parts with tailored properties, designed to have the highest strength in the areas where the part will bear the most load. This project will integrate computational materials engineering with experimental work to create and test this tailored design system. This approach will lead to fast and efficient casting design and manufacturing process development, resulting in discoveries of new high-performance alloys and lightweight castings which will reduce energy consumption and waste.
This project combines material design and manufacturing process development using a hybrid approach of CALPHAD (CALculation of PHAse Diagrams) and process simulation to more rapidly design lightweight aluminum castings for next generation automotive and aerospace structures. This novel approach will connect the thermodynamic prediction of alloy composition and heat treatment to process modeling to design more efficient castings using location-specific properties of new high-performance aluminum alloys being developed by Alcoa. This interdisciplinary research will be carried out to develop an integrated model for casting design, alloy design and process optimization - a first attempt to connect computational thermodynamics to component design. The design and simulation results will be validated by selective experimentation in test specimens and an automotive casting. Specifically, four research tasks will be carried out between The Ohio State University (OSU) and Alcoa to achieve the project goal: 1) CALPHAD modeling of solidification and heat treatment and alloy design; 2) process simulation and optimization using CALPHAD phase equilibria data; 3) component design using location-specific properties predicted by the hybrid approach of CALPHAD and process modeling to meet the location-specific service loading conditions; and 4) experimental validation using test specimens and an automotive casting.
