The casting blank of automobile engine cylinder head produced by sand mold gravity casting is shown in Figure 2-1. ZL105 aluminum alloy is selected as the material of sand casting, and the overall dimension of sand casting is 426mm × 200mm × 131mm, the volume is 4581cm3, and the weight of the whole sand mold casting is about 12.4kg. Sand castings belong to thin-walled box parts (minimum wall thickness 4mm). For single piece manual molding, the dimensional tolerance grade is 10ct.
Rapid sand casting refers to the process of setting process parameters, sand core design, gating system design, riser design and other steps of the three-dimensional model of the casting through the rapid sand casting process CAD system, and then using the sintered SLA rapid prototype as the pattern, combined with the excellent modeling ability of resin self hardening sand to directly turn the outer mold and sand core.
In the process of single piece, small batch or new product development, this process has the characteristics of short development cycle and higher precision than the traditional sand casting. Therefore, it is a development trend to use the manufacturing process of rapid sand casting technology to replace or improve the traditional process.