Investment casting is a casting process with little or no machining, formerly known as lost-wax casting. Castings produced using investment casting methods generally exhibit higher dimensional accuracy and surface quality than those produced by other methods. Furthermore, investment casting can produce complex and difficult-to-machine castings, making it highly popular among businesses.
Regarding the investment casting process, process design is a crucial step. This step is technically challenging and plays a vital role in the entire investment casting process, which is why it is often handled by highly specialized and technically skilled personnel.
Like other casting process designs, the design tasks for investment casting include:
1. Analyzing the manufacturability of the casting structure based on specific requirements;
2. Planning a reasonable process scheme, determining relevant casting process parameters, and drawing the casting design based on these parameters;
3. Designing the gating system and determining the mold structure. Except for slight differences in specific data due to the unique characteristics of investment casting, the design principles are exactly the same as for sand casting.
Since the process design stage of investment casting is of great importance to the entire casting process, and this stage requires a very high level of expertise from the designers, companies should attach great importance to this stage.
