Design for Casting - A New Paradigm for Preventing Potential Problems

Design revisions are expensive and time consuming. Yet, these are inevitable because product designers have limited knowledge about casting processes and have no means to evaluate the influence of design features on castability (costs, quality and productivity). Problems appear much later, at the tooling or manufacturing stage, when it is much more expensive to incorporate changes than at the design stage. Progressive engineering companies therefore rely on design review committees, which include tooling and casting engineers, to suggest early modifications to a product design for ease of manufacture. This paper presents an intelligent design environment to assist product engineers in assessing a part design for castability. The software simulates the way casting engineers decide the casting process, parting line, cores, mold box, feeders, gating system and mold layout, and analyzes each decision to suggest how the design could be modified to improve quality as well as reduce tooling and manufacturing costs. The software also facilitates electronic exchange of information between product, tooling and casting engineers, thus improving the level of communication between them and helping compress the total lead time to complete a project.