Optimizing Blend of Wax Pattern in the Investment Casting Process Using Grey Relational Analysis


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Authors

  • Aragaw Mulu Muhaba Faculty of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Keywords:

Investment, Dewaxing, Wax pattern, Taguchi, Grey relation, ANOVA

Abstract

Nowadays investment casting is one of the most essential kinds of metal casting, it showed its effectiveness for casting materials with complicated, irregular shapes that are expensive and difficult to machine. The role of this technology is negligible in Ethiopia. This is due to the cost for importation of the wax and refractory materials. In the investment casting, poor surface finish, hardness and too much shrinkage of the wax pattern often yield poor quality of the finished casting. This paper presents optimum blend of wax for investment casting wax pattern. An optimum blend of wax could provide better surface finish, least shrinkage and enough hardness to manufacture intricate part. The test was performed generally with different types of waxes namely vegetable wax, bee wax, Paraffin wax, tree resin and Vaseline, varying their proportions and process parameter. The assessment of the influence of each blend wax on basic properties of wax pattern like surface finish, percentage shrinkage and hardness has been enriched. An attempt was made to find out the set of input parameters, which could offer a set of ideal properties of the wax blend using Grey relational Analysis. From Grey relational analysis, it is found optimum result that the local blend of wax with the vegetable wax type of Candellila, its quantity of 5%, bee wax of 30%, paraffin wax of 60%, tree resin of 10%, Vaseline of 4%, injection temperature of $70^\circ$C and the Holding time of 2 hours. The confirmation experiments were carried out to validate the optimal results. Thus, the optimum investment mould compositions were optimized for achieving the combined objectives of higher compression strength of material, lower linear and volumetric expansion value on the dried mould considered in this work.

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Published

15-03-2019

How to Cite

Aragaw Mulu Muhaba. (2019). Optimizing Blend of Wax Pattern in the Investment Casting Process Using Grey Relational Analysis. International Journal of Mathematics And Its Applications, 7(1), 229–238. Retrieved from http://ijmaa.in/index.php/ijmaa/article/view/286

Issue

Section

Research Article