Water-soluble cores – verifying development trends

Abstract

Application of pure inorganic salt-based cores has been known since the end of the 20th century, especially in the field of gravity and low-pressure die casting. The contemporary trend in technology leads to the use of the cores in the field of non-ferrous-alloy high-pressure die casting. The main methods of the core production include high-pressure squeezing and shooting (warm core box). During research processes it was shown that pure-salt application is not very suitable for high-pressure casting. That is why a composite salt-based matrix of defined properties was started to be used. The aim of the paper is to verify the influences of the chemical composition, shape and morphology of the grains of various NaCl compounds on the mechanical properties (the bending strength) of water-soluble salt cores used for Al-alloy high-pressure die casting and to evaluate their properties resulting from the squeezing and shooting methods.