Continuous Cooling Analysis of Solidifying Pure Aluminum

The solidification behavior of pure aluminum in truncated cone shaped mold was studied to unravel the effect of section size on the as-cast structure, cooling curve, and solidification time. For this purpose, phenolic resin mold having the shape of truncated cone was considered and three K-type thermocouples were inserted in different cross sections of the mold and the continuous cooling curves from the pouring temperature were recorded using an accurate data acquisition system. It was revealed that by decreasing the cooling rate, the solidification time increases significantly. Subsequently the Chvorinov Rule was used to correlate the solidification time with section size through the geometrical modulus. These quantitative analyses can shed light on the processing of as-cast aluminum alloys.