Recently, full mold casting is used to manufacture many kinds of large-sized castings. However, this casting method involves peculiar problems, including the occurrence of foam residue defects. In this study, we proposed a new casting design system called foam residue traps to reduce foam residue defects. These traps are directly attached to the product part in the same way as overflows or risers to collect molten metal that includes a large amount of foam residue. In order to maximize the effect of foam residue traps, we also optimized the shape of trap by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and a multi-objective optimization method based on a genetic algorithm. Eventually, the effectiveness of the optimized shape was demonstrated through experiments with actual full mold casting.
