Development direction of the automotive industry casting

1. Lightweight of car castings

The lightweight of the car casting is as much as possible to reduce the quality of the car and achieve lightweight, thereby improving the power of the car, reducing fuel consumption, and reducing exhaust pollution.

For every 100 kg of car preparation, fuel consumption per 100 kilometers can be reduced by 0.3 ~ 0.6 L. If the weight of the vehicle is reduced by 10%, the fuel efficiency can be increased by 6%to 8%. With the needs of environmental protection and energy saving, the lightweight of cars has become the trend of the development of the world's automobiles, and the lightweighting of automobile castings has also become one of the important development directions of automobile casting.

1.1 Lightweight design of automobile casting

Due to the needs of the overall safety coefficient of casting, the thickness design is one of the main design methods of the car casting. However, the main disadvantage of thick design is that the structural performance cannot be given full, and the weight of the casting is increased. Use CAE analysis and topology optimization to optimize the components to make the components and components close to the stress value of each part of the components, that is, the wall thickness of each part is inconsistent, the small part with small parts is reduced or the material is not required to reduce the parts to reduce the parts the weight of. Considering the formation of complex structural castings, various irregularities can be achieved. When designing, it uses CAE or topological optimization to perform stress analysis of parts. According to the distribution of force, determine the shape of the parts and the thickness of the material. By adding muscles, digging holes, and deformation of castings, the weight of the components can be greatly reduced.

1.2 Light -alloy car casting

The use of aluminum -magnesium and other light alloy materials is currently the main weight reduction measures for automobile manufacturers in various countries. The density of aluminum is only 1/3 of the steel, and it has excellent corrosion resistance and ductility. The density of magnesium is smaller, only 2/3 of the aluminum, which has excellent liquidity in high -pressure casting conditions. The ratio of aluminum and magnesium is quite high (the ratio of strength to quality), which has a pivotal effect on reducing the weight and improving fuel efficiency. The competitiveness of the American automobile industry has increased in the past two years, which is closely related to its large use of aluminum -magnesium structure castings and integrated castings.

However, it should be noted that the price of raw materials such as aluminum -magnesium such as aluminum and magnesium is much higher than steel materials, which limits its wider application in the automotive industry. However, despite the high price of raw materials, the current amount of bicycles of magnesium and aluminum castings have risen year after year. On the one hand, it has made up for the increase in cost through technological progress, and on the other hand, the market competition forces auto manufacturers to reduce profits and use more light alloys. However, to increase the amount of light alloys in order to reduce the purchase price of magnesium and aluminum ingots, the development of advanced forming technology is one of the key.

1.3 High performance of automobile casting materials

Improving the performance of the material, enabling the unit weight parts to withstand higher loads is one of the methods to effectively reduce the weight of the casting. The bracket structure casting occupies a considerable proportion of automobile castings, so the development of its castings has also become one of the focus of attention. Through thermal treatment and other measures, the material micro -tissue changes, thereby increasing the strength, rigidity or toughness of the parts, and can effectively reduce the weight of the part.

Waiting for temperature quenching the ball ink cast iron, not only the intensity is more intensive than that of ordinary casting steel materials, but also lower density than steel. Its density is 7.1 G/CM3, and the density of cast steel is 7.8 g/cm3. It is a widely recommended material in recent years. Essence Under the condition of the same size of the temperature quenching ball, under the same size of the casting, 10%lighter than the casting steel parts. Generally speaking, the replacement of materials for car castings is often accompanied by the lightweight design of the parts.

In terms of aluminum alloy and magnesium alloy castings, high -strength and tough materials are also used for replacement. Based on the original light alloy weight loss, the application of high -performance materials is used for further weight loss. Alloy, which uses a high -pressure casting method to produce sub -frames, further reduced weight by 6kg on the basis of aluminum alloy weight loss.

2. Integration design of automobile casting

With the increasing requirements for energy conservation and environmental protection and reducing production costs, the advantages of casting formed by making full use of casting, several parts of the original stamping, welding, forging, and casting shall be Formed, it can effectively reduce the weight of the parts and reduce the unnecessary processing process, thereby achieving the lightweight and high performance of the parts.

At present, the integrated bridge shells we have developed are used to replace the new products with welding bridge shells and half -axis sleeve casting bridge shells, realize the integrated casting of castings, and make full use of the advantages of casting formed. The main form of common casting overall bridge shell is to press the seamless steel pipes at both ends of the bridge shell as a semi -axis tube, and fix the bridge shell assembly with a nail. In order to further improve the intensity, stiffness and simplified process of the bridge shell, the integrated bridge shell of the semi -axis sleeve can be cast directly on the bridge shell. And the rigidity of the bridge shell is better, which can be made into a complex and ideal shape. The wall thickness can change. It can obtain the ideal stress distribution. The strength and stiffness are large and the work is reliable.

The development trend of car casting integration is more obvious in the development of non -colored alloy castings. In order to make full use of the casting process to achieve the characteristics of the production of complex structural castings, high -pressure castings such as integrated design of the door, seat skeleton, dashboard skeleton, front -end framework, and firewall have appeared. Casting requires 4000 ~ 5000 t or even larger tonnage die -casting machines for production.

3. Digitalization of automobile casting development

The comprehensive combination of automobile casting development and digital technology can significantly improve the level of casting technology and shorten the product design and trial production cycle. Digital manufacturing technology has been widely used in the development of automotive casting. During the design and casting process design of casting structure, three -dimensional design software such as Pro/E, CATIA, and UG have been widely used, and some advanced casting companies have achieved paperless design.

In order to meet the needs of fast development of automobile castings, on the basis of the design and development of CAD/CAE, RP (fast prototype technology) has been widely used for fast trial production of car castings. After obtaining the original data of CAD/CAE, the method of accumulation is used to obtain the prototype of the cast or formation of the mold by bonding, melting or sintering. The former can be used by melting mold casting, gypsum casting and other methods to try casting samples, and the latter can directly create sand cores as molds and pour the casting through the group shape. In addition, the pink laser sintering method (SLS) can be used to directly complete the production of sand cores and sand, so as to obtain the sandy type required for casting trial production. For external molds with relatively simple structures, CNC machine tools can also be used to use processed plastics for CAM processing to obtain the core box and appearance required for casting trial production, or directly processed the sand blocks to obtain the sand type of the external mold.

Generally speaking, digital technology has penetrated the design, development and trial production of castings, which effectively improves the development speed and efficiency of castings. At present, the main problems are digital technologies in design, analysis and rapid manufacturing independence. When the development process is transformed from one stage to another, it is also necessary to carry out quite tedious data conversion work. It is hoped that in the future, a unified data interface platform can be developed for digital technologies applied to various aspects of casting development, standardized data conversion standards can be established, and data conversion standards are seamlessly conversion between different software, thereby further increasing the development speed of castings.

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