Optimisation of Additive Manufactured Sand Printed Mould Material for Aluminium Castings

The sand casting process is utilised for over 70% of all castings, the traditional this process requires a disposable sand mould, A pattern the shape of the product to be manufactured, plus manufacturing features is used to create the cavity. Additive Manufacturing processes have been used to generate the sand mould tools directly without patterns, hence reducing the lead time and manufacturing design constraints. This paper focuses on optimising the characteristics of the 3D Sand Printing process to traditional produced Furan mould tools, cumulating with an automotive turbo charger case study, to validate the build parameters optimisation process.