Following a mini getaway in June, my beloved and I arrived home to find our AC on the blink and a stuffy, 82-degree reading on the upstairs thermostat. Drat! It was the middle of a sizzling heat wave, so naturally it was impossible to get anyone out right away. Eventually, the service technician arrived––I think perhaps riding a white steed! His discovery of frozen coils wasn’t welcome news, but it was a start. He solved our big problem and pumped another year of life into our aging unit. 

You know, today, AFS is the proverbial field service truck pulling into the casting industry’s driveway––but looking more like the cavalry! They’re on a mission of relentless technical discovery and problem-solving that isn’t just great for foundries ... it’s huge for manufacturing consumers of metal castings. 

For example, the association is funding three new research projects as part of the American Metalcasting Consortium and Emergent Metal Casting Solutions (EMCS) program, sponsored by the Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Defense Logistics Agency Research and Development (R&D) Office, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. 

Here’s a brief summary of what’s happening:

1.    In partnership with University of California Irvine, Adjacency ML Analytics LLC, and Objective Inc., the first project aims to develop a machine-learning based image-recognition tool to diagnose aluminum-casting defects. This will allow metalcasters to more rapidly identify and diagnose defects in aluminum sand castings with fewer errors. 

2.    The second project, working alongside PDA LLC, seeks to develop data sets for alloys to be added to the Metallic Materials Properties Development and Standardization (MMPDS) handbook and the Casting Alloy Database Search (CADS). This information will provide pedigreed data for Department of Defense (DoD) end users to use castings in the C355-T6 alloy with no knockdown factor and with further optimizations in design.

3.    The third project, in partnership with Missouri S&T University, aims to develop a cutting-edge, in-line tool (using fiber optics) for automated production of aluminum investment castings critical to the DoD. 

Please get the full story on these projects at https://www.afsinc.org/research. And thanks for picking up the magazine––we’ve got some good reads inside.