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Manufacturing industries are very important lifeblood that support the Japanese economy from the bottom. Especially, automotive industries which consist of a wide range of business category and innovations have potential reverberations throughout the Japanese economy. However, materials industries that underlie all the manufacturing industries, especially automotive industries, are so medium-sized and small companies that they cannot sustain their research division, economically. More aggressive research activities on materials are desired for further development of Japanese industries.
Casting is a typical technology that produces complex-shaped metallic parts. There are variety of casting processes that are utilized in the wide variety of industries. Most of the cases, casting process can produce the metallic parts with low cost. This may be the reason why automotive industries are using a large number of casting parts. On the other hand, keeping casting quality high is hard work compared with other manufacturing processes like forging.
Research on casting is a kind of interdisciplinary task. From the scientific point of view, research on solidification (i.e. nucleation and crystal growth) and structure evolution is involved in the task. From the engineering point of view, research on process control and optimization of casting design is involved in the task.
This special issue includes selected papers about new casting processes and new simulation methods for optimization of casting design. Quality of casting strongly depends on not only used casting materials but also used casting processes. New casting process can produce quite a new casting quality. Also, new casting process simulation methods may enhance the optimization of casting design for present casting processes.
There are three papers about new casting process that are a capillary shaping process, a salt core process and an ultrafine spheroidal graphite iron casting process. And more three papers about new casting simulation methods and optimization of casting design that are a new simulation method for pure metal casting, a particle method for solidification simulation and an optimization of solidification conditions of pure copper casting. I hope that these six research papers can help the readers of this journal understand efforts for quality improvement of their casting products and discover new casting technology.
November 2, 2018
Guest Editor: Koichi ANZAI
Professor
Tohoku University
