Manage the Damage, Part III: Revealing the effect of hidden damage in aluminium castings

If you don’t see anything, there’s nothing to see, right?

The quality of aluminium castings is usually discussed in terms of visible features as pores. When designing and specifying demands on the parts, a large focus is put on the size of pores, as visualized by x-ray, that can be tolerated. This makes it easy to think that if pores are removed, the material is of high quality and will perform well.

In this webinar, we will present recent research that reveals how hidden damage affects the quality and performance of cast aluminium when it is subjected to different types of loads. We will have a look at the traditional meaning of casting quality and quality assurance techniques, before we dig into the topic of hidden damage. By combining techniques such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Digital Image Correlation (DIC), x-rays and CT-scans we will show with several examples how the things that we can’t see becomes visible, and how they are much more important than has previously been thought.