Solidification and Casting

Earlier, a special issue of Materials Science and Engineering (Jones and Kurz 1984) to mark the 30th anniversary of the identification of constitutional supercooling includes 21 concise survey papers which constitute an excellent source for assessing the state of knowledge on solidification at that stage. Another source is a textbook (Kurz and Fisher 1984) published the same year. 

The thixocasting mentioned above exploits dendritic solidification of alloys a semi-solidified alloy is forged under pressure into a die the dendrites are broken up into small fragments and a sound (pore-free) product is generated at a relatively low temperature, prolonging die-life. The array of related techniques of which this is one was introduced by Flemings and Mehrabian in 1971 and Flemings (1991) has recently reviewed them in depth. 

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G. J. Davies, Solidification and Casting, Applied Science Publishers, 1973. 

J. D. Hunt, in Solidification and Casting of Metals, Metals Society London, Sheffield, pp. 3-9. 

Pearson, D.D.,and Lemkey, F.D., Solidification and properties of yWy-a Mo ductile/ductile eutectic superalloy. In Solidification and Casting of Metals > London, 1979, 526-32. 

The solidification sequence during any casting process begins with the metal or alloy in a liquid form. To some extent the initial nuclea-tion processes are influenced by the structure and properties of the liquid and therefore it is instractive to begin our study of solidification and casting by examining liquid metals. 

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