Study of mould hardness for alpha set type resin bonded moulding sand system using Taguchi approach for metal casting applications

Abstract

The quality of the castings are depended on many properties of sand mould like mould hardness, green compression strength, shear strength etc. and these properties in turn dependent on factors such as grain fineness number of sand, setting/curing time, amount of resin, amount of hardener, moisture content etc. Mould hardness is very important while transferring mould from moulding station to pouring station when the weight of the mould is above 100kg and may lead to defects. In the present work, an effort is made to study the mould hardness of a moulding sand specimen using Taguchi technique.L9 orthogonal array is used and experiments are conducted randomly. The main factors such as the amount of resin, amount of hardener and setting time were considered. Factors were selected based on Literature review and brainstorming session with foundries. The chemical (resin and hardener) used is alphas set type two part system. From experiments, it was observed that the Amount of resin and setting time are significant for mould hardness. Confirmation tests were conducted to validate the obtained results.