Systematic Development of Cumulative Complexity Index for Investment Casting

Abstract

Investment casting is usually employed for producing industrial castings for different sectors including aerospace, automobile, bio-medical, chemical, defense and many more. Frequently, decision to manufacture any industrial component using investment casting process is mainly driven by many factors associated with geometry, desired features as well as manufacturability of industrial components. In this work, five-layered hierarchical structure-based novel Cumulative Complexity Index (CCI) has been developed for making appropriate decision to select investment casting process for manufacturing any industrial component. Top layer is comprised of CCI that is further categorized into three categories of Complexity Index (CI) including characteristics of geometry characteristics, desired features and manufacturability of an industrial component. The CIs are categorized into various 19 elements and further into 52 attributes. These attributes with 212 meta-attributes are employed to compute CCI (in the scale from 0 to 100). As the value of CCI is higher, complexity involved in manufacturing industrial component using investment casting is higher. The proposed concept of CCI is tested on different industrial case studies, and found very useful in making decision to select investment casting process for manufacturing those industrial components. This can be easily embedded with any existing tool on design for casting.