The so-called investment casting process is simply to use fusible materials (such as wax or plastic) to make a fusible model (referred to as investment or model), apply several layers of special refractory coatings on it, and dry and After being hardened to form an integral shell, use steam or hot water to melt the model from the shell, then place the shell in the sand box, fill with dry sand around it, and finally put the mold in the roasting furnace. High-temperature firing (if a high-strength mold is used, the mold shell after demolding can be directly fired without modeling). After the mold or mold is fired, molten metal is poured into it to obtain a casting.
The biggest advantage of investment casting is that because investment castings have high dimensional accuracy and surface finish, it can reduce machining work, just leave a little machining allowance on the parts with higher requirements, even some castings only leave the grinding and polishing allowance, it can be used without machining. It can be seen that the use of investment casting method can save a lot of machine tool equipment and processing man-hours, and greatly save metal raw materials.
Another advantage of the investment casting method is that it can precision cast complex castings of various alloys, especially high-temperature alloy castings. For example, the blade of a jet engine, its streamlined outline and cooling cavity, can hardly be formed by machining technology. Production with investment precision casting technology can not only achieve mass production, ensure the consistency of castings, but also avoid the stress concentration of residual knife marks after machining.