Recent Advancements in Customized Investment Castings Through Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Conventional investment casting (IC) has suffered from numerous limitations such as rigidity of the process, longer production cycles, higher tooling cost, and waste during different manufacturing stages. With the invent of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, it is now possible to overcome the aforesaid issues along with additional benefits in terms of comparatively better quality characteristics of the resulting castings. The collaboration of AM and IC provided numerous avenues, specifically in biomedical, aerospace, and automobile sectors. AM technologies supported the IC process both in direct and indirect ways where these systems can be used for both job and mass production applications, respectively. In the chapter, the author will try to discuss the assistance of AM process to IC in detail. Each and every step to be followed will be supported with the practical findings, either by the contributing author or published somewhere else. Moreover, some of the case studies will be discussed in detail to highlight the practical importance of the duo.