Introduction__________________________________________________ 3 1254.02 From the Process to the Microstructure____________________________ 3 1254.03

From the Cast Alloy to the Component___________________________ 14 1254.05 Literature_____________________________________________________15 1254.06 List of Figures_________________________________________________ 16

The design relevance of fatigue phenomena is certainly well-known, and it has been widely reviewed in the TALAT lecture 2400. The most important and used wrought alloys are presented there, describing their fatigue behaviour as the result of microstructural aspects, heat treatments and manufacturing processes (welding, bolting, and so on).

Due to their increasing relevance in various industrial applications, well documented by market studies, it seems interesting and useful to review the fatigue behaviour of Al casting alloys. Generally speaking, such a behaviour is affected by a lot of variables: the role of some of them (heat treatment, presence of inclusions) is the same as in wrought alloys (and it has been already described in TALAT lecture 2400). There are, however, other variables which are peculiar for cast alloys and decisive in determining the fatigue performance of castings. For studying them, it is necessary to consider that -

The casting processes industrially available for Al alloys are several, and their number is continuously increasing. TALAT lecture 3200 gives an overview of the most common as well as of the newer casting processes. The more useful way for classifying such processes is based on the characteristics of thermal field they impose on the alloy. This means that parameters such as cooling rate [K/s] and thermal gradient [K/mm] are good indexes of the evolution of the process. Table 1 lists the typical thermal parameters induced by different conventional processes.

Cooling
rate
[K/s]

Thermal gradient [K/mm]