Effect of casting temperature on grain size of Al-Si alloys refined by a novel grain refiner

Abstract

The automotive industry is willing of employing a greater amount of light metals like aluminium, magnesium and titanium, in order to reduce the total weight of the cars and, consequently, fuel consumption. Even though some casting aluminium alloys are commonly employed for automotive structural applications, their mechanical performances can be improved by means of appropriate grain refining by heterogeneous nucleation. This practise is well established for wrought aluminium alloys by using Al-Ti-B master alloys but they are not effective in casting alloys due to the much higher silicon percentage (poisoning). A novel chemical composition which, actually, refines appropriately Al-Si alloys was developed at Brunel University. In this study the combined effect of casting temperature and addition of this novel grain refiner (NGR) on the microstructure of binary Al-Si alloys was considered. The addition of this NGR leads to the formation of finer primary α-Al grains, finer eutectic Al-Si intermetallics and less and smaller primary Si particles.