SANDT - Non Destructive Testing of SAnd moulds

Important results from the project

The projects aim is to develop non-destructive test methods to measure the quality of sand molds and surface layers before casting. This leads to a 20% reduction in production costs for sand foundries, which would otherwise go to correcting imperfections in sand moulds and cores. Better mold quality leads to competitive advantages for the foundries and for industries downstream of the entire casting value chain. In addition, better control of the quality of the sand mold allows better precision when casting with narrow margins, for road vehicles and other machine components.

Expected long term effects

Increased competitiveness and higher resource efficiency for cast components for vehicles and energy production systems. The result is a specification and two verified practical demonstrators: 1. new computerized measurement method for tomographic analysis of moisture and density distribution in sand castings. 2. new computerized and digitizable non-destructive test method of sand molds for iron and steel casting, where tomographic methods are combined with laser 3D scanning and traditional methods for moisture measurements in surface coating against the sand casting mold.

Approach and implementation

Over 1000 data files have been aquired at the foundries with different measurement setups and material choices in the sand molds as well as sand sample geometries. These include measurements with various black coatings, sand systems (green sand, furan and cement), hardening, moisture and density distributions in sand molds (different degree of framing / packing). Safer quality control is achieved by non-destructively measuring the hardness of the sand molds and measuring the moisture content before applying the critical black coating to the sand molds and cores during production.