The comprehensive combination of Automobile Casting Development and digital technology can significantly improve the level of casting technology and shorten the period of product design and trial production. At present, digital manufacturing technology has been widely used in the development of automobile castings. In the stage of casting structure design and casting process design, Pro / E, CATIA, UG and other three-dimensional design software have been widely used, and some advanced casting enterprises have realized paperless design. Magma, pro cast, Huazhu CAE and other software have been widely used in the simulation of solidification process, microstructure, composition segregation and material properties of automobile castings. They can also simulate the speed field, concentration field, temperature field, phase field, stress field and other aspects of the casting process, which can ensure that the process plan is optimized before mass production.
In order to meet the needs of rapid development of automobile castings, RP (Rapid Prototyping Technology) has been widely used in the rapid trial production of automobile castings based on the design and development of CAD / CAE. After the original data of CAD / CAE is obtained, the casting prototype or the mold prototype required for the casting is obtained by the method of layer by layer stacking, bonding, fusion or sintering. The former can be used for trial production of casting samples by investment casting, gypsum casting and other methods, while the latter can be directly used as a mold to manufacture sand cores, and the castings can be poured out by core forming. In addition, SLS can be used to make sand core and sand mold directly, so as to obtain sand mold for trial production of castings. For the external mold with relatively simple structure, we can also use CNC machine tools and machinable plastics for cam processing, so as to obtain the core box and pattern required for casting trial production, or directly process the sand block to directly obtain the sand mold of the external mold.
In general, digital technology has run through all aspects of casting design, development and trial production, effectively improving the speed and efficiency of casting development. At present, the main problem is that the digital technologies of design, analysis and rapid manufacturing are independent. When the development process is transformed from one stage to another, there is still a rather tedious data transformation work. In the future, we hope to develop a unified data interface platform for the digital technology applied in each link of casting development, establish standardized data conversion standards, and realize seamless data conversion between different software, so as to further improve the speed of casting development.