Materials and Manufacturing

Research in Materials and Manufacturing Technology for Casting is multidisciplinary and includes areas such as material technology, design and production technology. The research is focused on material structures at different levels as well as the mechanical properties on the component level, as influenced by the manufacturing process.

Background

The activities and research work are based on experiments on the laboratory scale as well as on full-scale experiments performed in the industry. Studies are conducted within areas such as kinetics of phase transformations using thermal analysis, coupling between microstructure and mechanical properties,processes, defectformation, fractography and structure mechanics.

The purpose is most often to develop knowledge about critical relations which can serve as a basis for mathematical modeling and simulation. Most studied materials are cast iron, aluminium and magnesium bas alloys. By using modeling and simulation, the researchers can predict and investigate different phenomena for situations where it is difficult, or even impossible, to make relevant experiments.

Research topic

Virtual and computational modeling of materials
This area includes materials design, which means that the microstructure will be designed to give what is desired over all.

Microstructure and property relationships in materials
There is a direct correlation between the arrangements of atoms to phases and phases formed into microstructures to the materials behaviour on a macroscopic scale.

Mechanical properties and materials performance including fatigue, creep and elastic and plastic deformation
The study of how elastic and plastic deformation responds to loads of the cast materials by testing of the not uniform deformation behavior including creep and thigh temperature properties

Materials processing and manufacturing
The casting process gives influences the result of the casting,  which are depending on the process, cooling conditions, mould and core materials, chemical composition and metallurgy treatment of the melt etc.

New materials and technologies
This topic contains new types of materials such as SSM (semi solid metals), MMC (metal matrix composites) and different kinds of material combinations within one and the same component (multifunctional component).

Multidisciplinary and Multi-Objective Optimization
This topics includes fluid flow, thermo mechanical and other areas which are important for the casting material in combination with metallurgy and material aspects. The goals of several areas have to be optimized.