DEMO DAY innowacji 4.0

The project concerns the technology of making medium and large iron alloy castings in sand molds, the working surfaces and cores of which are covered with protective coatings to reduce the tendency to form surface defects of the following types: scorching, pitting, scabbing, erosion, veining, etc. The surfaces of sand mold cavities, even after protective coatings currently offered on the market of casting materials are applied to them, are very often subject to thermal and mechanical degradation, resulting in the appearance of the mentioned defects. Protection of the surface in the current solution with the application of protective coatings in the form of liquid ceramic masses is far from sufficient. Subsequent removal of the resulting defects on the surface of castings, which are physically a layer of sintered ceramic mass and quartz matrix fused to the metal on the surface of castings, is extremely cumbersome and labor-intensive. Layers of ceramic-metal sinters, sometimes several millimeters thick, can only be removed by grinding, which is usually done manually by the casting plant's cleaning staff. Manual grinding of surfaces is one of the most troublesome technological operations in a foundry due to: emission of large amounts of the resulting fine airborne dust, the high noise level of grinding machines, and the high harmfulness of the resulting dust to the health of workers. The solution according to the project is to replace traditional and often ineffective liquid protective coatings with hybrid coatings, which include thermally resistant thin nonwoven fabrics or dense meshes made of inorganic materials. The technology for manufacturing and applying hybrid coatings to sand molds has been developed and described by the author of a patent application filed with CTT AGH under No. 622-23/20. The effectiveness of the new coatings has been confirmed in a series of laboratory-scale tests on castings made of iron weighing several kilograms, and is already being confirmed on an industrial scale on castings weighing several tons (the first few large castings). The results of these tests are very promising, a surface free of the described defects is obtained, a surface with high smoothness, which does not require additional processing (grinding). The molding mass, after the casting has cooled, is spontaneously separated from the casting surface which eliminates or very much reduces the need for grinding it