Influence of different contents of Si and Cu on the solidification pathways of cast hypoeutectic Al-(5–9)Si-(1–4)Cu (wt.%) alloys

Abstract and figures

A comprehensive understanding of solidification process is of paramount importance for the control and prediction of actual casting characteristics. The present work presented the potential of cooling curve analysis to characterize the solidification path of cast hypoeutectic series of Al–Si–Cu alloys. The aim of this work was to examine how variation in chemical composition of Si (from 5–9 wt.% ) and Cu (from 1–4 wt.%) may affect characteristic solidification temperatures, their corresponding fraction solid, and thermal freezing ranges of investigated alloys. All solidification parameters that have been calculated using cooling curve analyses show good correlation with the corresponding parameters calculated using commercial Pandat software. These parameters either collected from the cooling curve analysis or calculated using Pandat software can be easily incorporate into existing simulation software packages in order to improve their accuracy. In addition, cooling curve analysis can be used to estimate the effect of cooling rate on above mentioned solidification parameters and used as additional input data for simulation.