Continuous centrifugal casting: A revolutionary process for casting aluminium tubes

Abstract

Aluminium tubing is currently produced using a sequence of direct chill casting of billets followed by extrusion. These are two processes using expensive equipment and producing a certain amount of scrap. There is a strong motivation to reduce the transformation costs. A new approach consists in directly casting the tubes using a novel process called Continuous Centrifugal Casting (CCC). This process shares similarities with centrifugal casting, direct chill casting and continuous strip casting. A dedicated equipment was developed, including a rotating mould, special molten metal feeding system and tube extraction mechanisms. This equipment is actually operated to optimize the process. The purpose of this paper is to introduce to the basics of the process and to present the preliminary results related to the various process parameters such as the rotating speed, the extraction rate, the metal flow and water cooling configuration.