Taguchi Optimisation of Cast Geometries for A356/Organic Particulate Aluminium Alloy Composites Using a Two-Phase Casting Process

Abstract

The A356 alloy is widely known to exhibit an extremely superior casting, machining, mechanical, and corrosion resistance properties. Despite these, it constitutes an environmental nuisance at its improper disposal for worn-out engine blocks. Also, organic reinforcements have the potentials to reduce the environmental impacts of composites. Consequently, there exits significant research potential to fuse A356 alloy with organic materials to obtain enhanced composite properties. In the area of aluminium matrix, as melting and solidifications of materials are done the accuracy of measurements is driven by the huge array of process parameters and the geometrical aspect of cast components is important. For these reasons, we attempt to solve the problem of optimising the geometry of casts in a complicated scenario with the use of the robust Taguchi's methods. To optimise the framework, the significant process parameters are identified and their effects studied in a route using Taguchi, Taguchi-Pareto and Taguchi–ABC methods. Parameters such as the volume of the cast, length, weight, density, height, width, breadth, weight loss and the total weight of organic materials infused into the melting process were studied for parametric changes, interactions and optimisation with L27 orthogonal array. The analysis of variance for the A356 alloy cast revealed that the density parameter of cast 1 had the highest and major significant effect on the casting process with a variance of 333573, followed by weight parameter of casts 1 and 2, total weight of organic material parameters and weight loss with the variance values of 0.007, 0.005, 0.001 and 0.004, respectively. The variance of other parameters was insignificant to the A356 alloy cast.