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Content archived on 2024-04-16

PRODUCT ASSURANCE FOR THE HIGH PRESSURE ALUMINIUM DIE CASTING INDUSTRY USINGKBS SYSTEMS APPLIED TO PROCESS CONTRO L AND NDT

Objective


Under the overall title of ALEXSYS 2 related knowledge based systems have been produced for aluminium pressure die casters. One is used for the diagnosis of the causes of defects in castings and suggests remedial process parameter adjustments. The second is intended for use at the design stage to give an ab initio improvement in casting quality and reduced die run-in time. The knowledge for the systems comes principally from a casting consultancy in Germany. The systems have been tested in the field in Greece and in the United Kingdom. The hardware requirement is for a fast personal computer (PC) with a minimum of 8 MBytes of random access memory (RAM) running Microsoft Windows. A compact disc read only memory (CD ROM) is required for image and other data.

Ancillary to the expert systems is a catalogue of die casting defects. This may be used either as a stand-alone catalogue that, it is hoped, will be found useful by purchasers and manufacturers of casting in arriving at a mutually agreed specification for parts, or as a nonverbal interface to the expert systems themselves. The catalogue is available both in printed and electronic forms.

It is intended that the systems be widely usable throughout the European Community by persons with varying levels of education who are native speakers of a variety of languages. In consequence, the usual verbal keyboard interaction has been substantially replaced by a library of images of defects from which users select examples that characterize their problems. This selection is used by the expert system to provide the basis for a diagnosis or advice. Proposals are made for a set of standard symbols that can be for the nonverbal representation of the nature and location of casting defects.

The close control of the die casting process requires low cost, high throughput, nondestructive testing methods that can, if necessary, be applied to every component as it is produced. Improvements have been made to the already well established liquid dye penetration (LPT) technique to render it suitable for quasicontinuous processing.

Work has been carried out to increase the repeatability and precision of density measurements and to correlate density shortfall with porosity.

Research has been carried out into the fundamental thermal transfer processes that occur when castings are heated by a laser. It has been shown that it is possible to detect surface defects and to infer the presence of internal defects from disturbances in the temperature contours observable on the surface of the component. This work provides the basis of a novel NDT technique that is capable of detecting delamination-like defects laying parallel to surfaces. Such defects are inaccessible to methods such as X-ray radiography.

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Coordinator

University of Teesside
EU contribution
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Participants (5)

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