Fabrication of integral ceramic mold for investment casting of hollow turbine blade based on stereolithography

Haihua Wu, Dichen Li and Nannan Guo

State Key Laboratory of Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technique, Xian Jiaotong University, Xian, Peoples Republic of China
Abstract Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel process of integral ceramic molds for investment casting of hollow turbine blades. Design/methodology/approach At rst, a resin pattern of a hollow turbine blade prototype is fabricated by stereolithography (SL). And then aqueous gelcasting process is utilized to ll the resin pattern with ceramic slurry of low viscosity and low shrinkage, through in situ polymerization of the slurry a ceramic mold is formed. At last, the ceramic mold for investment casting of hollow turbine blade is obtained by vacuum drying, pyrolyzing and sintering. Findings An integral ceramic mold is successfully fabricated by combining SL and gelcasting process, cores and shell are connected with each other and thus high relative position accuracy is guaranteed. Properties of integral ceramic mold at room temperature and high temperature satisfy the requirements of directional casting for complex-shaped thin-walled blades. Research limitations/implications Because the integral ceramic mold is a close body, it is very difcult to directly measure its inner dimensions and the relative position accuracy of cores and shell, and the further research is needed. Originality/value This method enhanced the versatility of using SL prototype in the fabrication of integral ceramic mold for investment castings. Although this paper took a hollow turbine blade as an example, this method is also capable of fabricating integral ceramic molds for other complex investment castings. Keywords Rapid prototypes, Ceramics, Turbines, Aircraft engines Paper type Case study

1. Introduction
High quality ceramic mold is the basis of investment-cast hollow turbine blade for aero engines. In the traditional manufacturing process of ceramic molds, assembly errors often occur in the process of assembling ceramic cores to waxpattern die, because of the injection force in the process of wax making and the impact force caused by molten metal in casting process, unxed ceramic cores may deviate from original position (Barnett, 1988; Mraz, 1997; Ford, 1997; Galantucci, 1998; Dolgov et al., 1997). Limited by the forming ability of injecting molding and the structural complexity of hard tooling, ceramic cores with intricate structure can hardly be manufactured integrally, while they can only be manufactured by assembling several simple cores together. However, it is very difcult to assemble cores with high positioning accuracy. In near-net-shape investment casting of hollow turbine blades, core shift defects often occur due to the position errors between cores and that between cores and shell, and the qualied rate of hollow
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turbine blades is low. With the improvement of engine comprehensive performance, internal cooling channels of hollow turbine blades are becoming more complex, and wall thickness of it is becoming thinner, which brings a new challenge to investment casting. If ceramic cores and shell are connected together in the forming process of integral ceramic mold, instead of traditional casting process of assembling ceramic cores into shell, the position accuracy between cores and that between cores and shell will be ensured and the qualied rate will be increased. Rapid prototyping (RP) technology and gelcasting process provide technical conditions for the preparation of integral ceramic molds. There are various RP parts that can be used to replace wax patterns, such as salt models, resin models, polystyrene models, starch models, paper models, etc. So that there is no need to manufacture wax-pattern dies. The process can be simplied and the manufacturing cost can be reduced (Liu et al., 2005; Chua et al., 2005; Dotchev and Soe, 2006; Marutani and Kamitani, 2004; Jones and Yuan, 2003).
This research work was supported by 973 Program of the Peoples Republic of China (Grant No. 2007CB707704) and Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University. The authors are grateful for the grants. Received: 29 July 2008 Revised: 16 October 2008 Accepted: 17 December 2008

Rapid Prototyping Journal 15/4 (2009) 232 237 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 1355-2546] [DOI 10.1108/13552540910979749]

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Stereolithography (SL) is a typical RP process, it has advantages of high forming accuracy, good rigidity and ne surface quality. It is quite suitable to be used to manufacture molds or dies with internal and external complex structures. Utilizing SL technology to prepare resin pattern can overcome the disadvantages of high cost and long cycle in designing and manufacturing complex molds (Onuh and Hon, 2001). Gelcasting is an advanced and near-net-shape forming process, following the development of slip casting and injection molding. Ceramic slurry using deionized water as solvent has good uidity, and it can ll up the complex mold cavity without additional pressure. The forming ability is only limited by the complex degree of the mold cavity rather than mold material, many kinds of materials such as wax, plastics, resin, metal, etc. can be used (Dhara et al., 2002; Yang et al., 2005). Compared with injection molding, gelcasting green bodies have advantages of higher strength, better uniformity, lower organic content, easiness of degreasing and no defects such as warpage, cracking, etc. occur (Gilissen et al., 2000; Omatete et al., 1997; Tong and Chen, 2004). The paper combines gelcasting process with SL technology and presents a new method of manufacturing integral ceramic mold. The method mainly includes: . designing and manufacturing a resin pattern of hollow turbine blade using SL technology; . rapidly fabricating integral ceramic mold with gelcasting process; and . providing a high quality ceramic mold for hollow turbine blade.

from 3 to 8 mm, to eliminate the harmful inuence of thick shell on casting metallurgical performance. Gating system prototype for ceramic slurry is used to help ceramic slurry ll the cavity of the resin mold and the internal cooling channels smoothly and duplicate the structural features of the hollow turbine blade. After burning out the gating system prototype for liquid metal, the ceramic body covering it forms a ceramic gating system, which functions as the gating system for molten metal. In this research, SL was employed to fabricate the resin mold. The SL apparatus SPS 450B was developed by the Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technology in Xian Jiaotong University of China. CAD model of the resin mold was converted into STL data and then sliced into 0.05 mm layer thickness in data-processing software. The resin prototype could then to be fabricated quickly and automatically using Somos14120 resin from DSM Corporation.

3. Fabrication of integral ceramic mold

3.1 Preparation of ceramic slurry Corundum is a type of high quality refractory material used in investment casting, which has low melting point (2,0308C), high density (3.95 g/cm3), good thermal conductivity, good chemical stability at high temperature, low and uniform thermal expansion coefcient. It does not react with chemical elements contained in the alloys such as Ni, Cr, Al and Ti. The chemical constituents of corundum are presented in Table I. The distribution of Al2O3 particles is presented in Table II. Magnesium oxide (D50 2 mm) and yttrium oxide (D50 2 mm) used as mineralizer are provided by Shandong Zibo Aluminum Inc. China. The mass fraction of the magnesium oxide and yttrium oxide are 99.99 per cent. Deionized water is chosen as solvent, and acrylamide (CH3CONH2, AM) as organic monomer, N,N-methylene diacrylamide (C7H 10N2O 2, MBAM) as cross-linking agent, ammonium persulfate as initiator, N,N,N 0 ,N 0 tetramethylethylenediamine (C 6H 16 N2, TEMED) as catalyst, and sodium polyacrylate as dispersant. And then the pH value of ceramic slurry is adjusted by strong ammonia (Ma et al., 2002; Takahashi et al., 2004). The main components of ceramic slurry are presented in Table III. Premixed solution with the concentration of 25 per cent is prepared by dissolving AM and MBAM (in 24:1 ratio) in proper amount of deionized water. After adding proper

2. Design and fabrication of SL resin mold

It is very difcult for traditional process to manufacture molds of hollow turbine blades integrally, while SL technology has the advantage to fabricate them. In addition, SL resin molds can be easily burned out to leave a casting cavity with ceramic cores to cast hollow complex parts. Figure 1 shows ceramic mold as well as CAD model and SL prototype of resin mold including hollow turbine blade prototype 1, resin mold shell 2, gating system prototype for liquid metal 3 and gating system prototype for ceramic slurry 4. Among them the hollow turbine blade prototype is the most important part, which functions as both the sacricial pattern used to form the ceramic shell and the shape-forming mold of ceramic core. Resin mold shell, an auxiliary structure, is used to form the cavity of resin mold. The distance between the mold shell and the blade prototype should be controlled in the range

Figure 1 CAD model, SL prototype of resin mold and ceramic mold, (a) CAD model; (b) SL prototype of resin mold; (c) ceramic mold
2

Sprue 4

3 1 Runner and riser

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Table I Chemical constituents of corundum

Chemical constituents Mass fraction (per cent) Al2O3 99.32 Na2O 0.48 SiO2 0.04 Fe2O3 0.05

then heated to 1,5508C for 3-4 h with a heating rate of 4208C/h, nally cooled to ambient temperature along with the furnace. The resin prototype is burned out and the residual ash left in the ceramic mold is removed by compressed air below 0.2 MPa, a quality and high accuracy ceramic mold is obtained. 3.4 Test method for properties of integral ceramic mold Properties of integral ceramic mold, including room and hightemperature properties such as deection at high temperature, sintered shrinkage, apparent porosity, etc. are required in the investment casting of hollow turbine blades (Qin et al., 2007). Testing were carried out in accordance with HB 5353.4-2004, which is a test standard of China Aviation Industry. The three-point bending strengths of the sintered samples at room temperature were measured using INSTRON-1195 universal material testing machine. The three-point bending strengths of the sintered samples at 1,5508C were measured using WDW200-type electronic universal testing machine, after heated to 1,5508C with a heating rate of 300-4008C/h for 30 min. The specimens were 60 mm 10 mm 4 mm. The span length was 30 mm, and loading speed was 0.5 mm/min. The lengths of specimens (50 mm) were measured, respectively, before and after sintering to calculate the sintered shrinkage. Deections induced by gravity at 1,5508C were measured by putting specimens on a double-supported stents, and then the specimens (120 mm 6 mm 2 mm) were heated to 1,5508C for 30 min, cooled below 1008C. The apparent porosity of the sintered samples were determined by Archmedes method. Hitachi S-3000N scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to observe the microstructure of the sample.

Table II The distribution of ner and coarser Al2O3 particles

Coarser Al2O3 particles Finer Al2O3 particles

Particle size (mm) 0-14 14-20 20-28 28-40 0-3.5 3.5-5 5-7 7-10 Mass fraction (per cent) 6 30 49 15 8 36 46 10

amount of sodium polyacrylate (25 per cent of solid power mass) to the premixed solution, the pH value of the premixed solution is adjusted to 11 by adding strong ammonia. Corundum powder is added in steps. Ceramic slurry with high solids loading (58 vol%), low viscosity (0.675 Pa s) and low shrinkage (0.5 per cent) is prepared after ball milling for 2-3 h. 3.2 Forming and drying process After adding initiator and catalyst into the ceramic slurry, the ceramic slurry is stirred in vacuum for 5 min to degas (Dhara et al., 2004). The ceramic slurry is smoothly poured into the mold cavity and internal cooling passages of the hollow turbine blade prototype, at the same time, a vibration (amplitude is 1-3 mm, vibration frequency is 30-60 Hz) is applied, and then the ceramic slurry is in situ polymerized with the inner and outer structural features of the hollow turbine blade prototype copied to form the green body of ceramic mold, of which all the parts are connected to be an integral one. The resin mold shell and the prototype of the ceramic slurry gating system are removed and the green ceramic mold is put into a vacuum drying oven (208C). The green ceramic mold is dried for 4.5-10 h under a vacuum degree of 10 Pa. And the time of vacuum drying is determined by the size of the green ceramic mold. 3.3 Sintering process After completely dried, the green ceramic mold is moved into a high-temperature sintering furnace, and heated to 3008C with a heating rate of 108C/h and kept at 3008C for 1 h, and

4. Results and discussion

4.1 Fabrication results The integral ceramic mold was fabricated in the green state. However, defects such as cracks and distortions emerged during the drying and pyrolyzing processes. Several factors contribute to the defects: . In vacuum drying, ceramic green body will shrink unavoidably, the linear shrinkage for 50 vol% solids loading is about 3 per cent (Gilissen et al., 2000). Because the resin mold hinders the shrinkage, a temporary stress in the green body will occur. When the stress is

Table III The main compositions of ceramic slurry

Solid powder Al2O3 particles Adding amount Adding amount (g in 100 ml deionized water) Weight per cent of solid powder (per cent) Coarser 409.00 75 Finer 98.19 18 Chemical compositions Organic substance Organic Cross-linking Mineralizer monomer agent Magnesium Yttria oxide AM MBAM 27.27 5 10.91 2 32 1.333

Initiator APS 1.333

Catalyst TEMED 0.2666

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greater than the green strength, cracking will occur in the weak section of the green body such as narrow-section junctions. SL prototype is made of thermosetting materials, its thermal expansion is far greater than that of ceramic green body, which would probably cause cracking of the ceramic green body in rapid pyrolyzing.

Table IV Comparison between integral ceramic mold and AC-1 ceramic cores
Resources Integral ceramic AC-1 ceramic mold cores 14-17 2.70-3.56 0.9-1.2 0.20-0.50 40-44 9-12 5-7 0.8-1.6 1.5 34

Properties Flexural strength at room temperature (MPa) Flexural strength at 1,5508C (MPa) Deection at 1,5508C (mm) Sintered shrinkage (per cent) Apparent porosity (per cent)

The solutions to these problems include minimizing the drying shrinkage by properly increasing organic monomer content or cross-linking agent content to improve the elastic modulus of the green body, decreasing initial pore size by mixing ner and coarser powers and increasing solid phase volume of the slurry, using a moderate pyrolyzing schedule and properly increasing the shell thickness. After drying and pyrolyzing steps, sintering is the most critical phase in the process because it involves obvious physical changes in the ceramic mold. Warping, sagging, deforming and cracking are common problems. There are many possible causes for even a single problem, e.g. the cracking of ceramic cores in sintering could result in excessive sintered shrinkage, rapid heating and inhomogeneous density. The approaches used to avoid the defects in sintering can be summarized as follows: . choosing a suitable sintering furnace which could provide uniform heating and maintain an appropriate sintering atmosphere; . decreasing sintered shrinkage by controlling sintering temperature and holding time or by adding mineralizer such as magnesium oxide; and . using a shorter sintering time at a sufciently high temperature to reduce the risk of sagging due to gravity. Figure 2 shows the ceramic mold fabricated with the mentioned process. A closed integral ceramic mold was sintered with good geometrical accuracy (variations less than 0.2 mm). As shown in Figure 2, ceramic cores with intricate structure and well-connected cores and shell, can be easily observed. 4.2 Properties of integral ceramic mold The main properties of the ceramic mold fabricated by the authors and the AC-1 ceramic cores made by Institute of Aeronautical Materials, Beijing, China, which have been successfully applied in the manufacturing of four different types of aero engine blades, are listed in Table IV. Compared with AC-1 ceramic cores, our ceramic mold has higher exural strength at room temperature (14-17 MPa), higher apparent porosity (40-44 per cent), lower deection at high

Note: 1,5508C is the typical temperature of directional casting

temperature (only 0.9-1.2 mm at 1,5508C), smaller sintered shrinkage (0.20-0.50 per cent) and a little lower hightemperature strength, it can meet the requirements of directional casting for hollow turbine blades. Higher apparent porosity, left by the removal of organic binder, is benecial to dissolving and removing ceramic cores after casting. Lower deection of ceramic cores at 1,5508C is helpful to ensure the precision and integrality of castings. Smaller sintered shrinkage is obtained due to the compensation by the volume expansion of MgAl2O3. Figure 3 shows the microstructure of a fracture surface in the ceramic green body. Among alumina particles there is a large amount of three-dimensional network organic binder, which provides the green body with high strength (Santacruz et al., 2004). the exural strength of ceramic green body at 258C is about 12 MPa. Figure 4 shows the microstructure of the ceramic mold after sintering at 1,5508C for 4 h. In the gure, the gray and coarser areas A are the unreacted alumina particles which form the skeleton of ceramic mold, making the mold have enough hightemperature exural strength, while the round small white areas B encompassing the coarser particles are MgAl2O3, 3Y2O3 5Al2O3 and some fused ner alumina particles. The ner Al2O3 particles and the Y2O3 particles react to form 3Y2O3 5Al2O3, a polycrystalline composition, and the ner Al2O3 particles and the MgO particles react to form MgAl2O3, another polycrystalline composition. The coarser Al2O3 particles, which react at a slower rate than the ner

Figure 3 SEM of ceramic mold before sintering Figure 2 The integral ceramic mold
Particle

Binder

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Figure 4 SEM of ceramic mold after sintering

A

Figure 5 An investment-cast hollow turbine blade, (a) the blade casting with cores; (b) the front of the blade casting; (c) the side of the blade casting

Al2O3 particles, remain substantially unreacted during sintering.

4.3 Hollow turbine blade A 20CrNiMo hollow turbine blade fabricated using the integral ceramic mold mentioned above is shown in Figure 5. The process of investment casting includes: heating the ceramic mold to 1,5508C for 1 h, casting molten metal into the integral ceramic mold through the ceramic gating system, removing the ceramic shell by mechanical crushing and removing the cores with high temperature alkali solution under alternating pressures, and nally after sand blasting and acid pickling, a hollow turbine blade with the same structure of SL resin prototype is obtained. The blade casting with intricate ceramic cores is shown in Figure 5(a), and the front and side of the casting are shown, respectively, in Figure 5(b) and (c). The contour of the casting is very clear and complicated internal cooling channels can also be observed.

5. Conclusions
Based on SL resin prototype, this study presents a new fabrication process of integral ceramic mold and rapidly converts the resin prototypes into hollow turbine blades using investment casting. By designing and fabricating SL resin mold and utilizing gelcasting process to ll the resin mold with ceramic slurry, an integral ceramic mold, in which cores and shell are connected with each other, is obtained. Because ceramic mold is a closed body, it is very difcult to directly measure its inner dimensions and the relative position accuracy of cores and shell. In the industrial production, an indirect method, by pouring a free shrinkage and low melting point alloy (Sn48%-Bi52%, shrinkage is 0.02 per cent) into the mold and measuring the required dimensions of the casting after removing the cores and shell, is used to evaluate the accuracy of the ceramic mold. However, in this method the ceramic mold has to be destroyed, and the error of investment casting is also introduced, so further studies are required to nd out a more advanced and convenient measuring method and an accuracy evaluation system for ceramic molds. 236

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Further reading
Cheah, C.M., Chua, C.K., Lee, C.W., Feng, C. and Totong, K. (2005), Rapid prototyping and tooling techniques: a review of applications for rapid investment casting, The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 308-20. Dickens, P.M., Stangroom, R., Greul, B.M. and Holmer, K.K.B. (1995), Conversion of RP models to investment castings, Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 1 No. 4, pp. 4-11. Dweck, J., Fischer, R. and Fischer, E. (1997), Thermogravimetric characterization of gelcast alumina composites, Journal of Thermal Analysis, Vol. 49 No. 3, pp. 1249-54. Ferreira, J.C. and Mateus, A. (2003), A numerical and experimental study of fracture in RP stereolithography patterns and ceramic shells for investment casting, Journal of Materials Processing Technology, Vol. 134 No. 1, pp. 135-44. Ghosal, S., Emami-Naeini, A., Harn, Y.P., Draskovich, B.S. and Pollinger, J.P. (1999), A physical model for the drying of gelcast ceramics, Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol. 82 No. 3, pp. 513-20. Hague, R., DCosta, G. and Dickens, P.M. (2001), Structural design and resin drainage characteristics of QuickCast 2.0, Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 66-72. Kryachek, V.M. (2004), Injection molding (review), Powder Metallurgy and Metal Ceramics, Vol. 43 No. 7, pp. 336-48. Ma, L.G., Huang, Y., Yang, J.L., Le, H.R. and Sun, Y. (2006), Control of the inner stresses in ceramic green bodies formed by gelcasting, Ceramics International, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 93-8. Rak, Z. (1999), New trends in powder injection molding, Powder Metallurgy and Metal Ceramics, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 126-32. Schere, G.W. (1990), Theory of drying, Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol. 73 No. 1, pp. 3-14. Tari, G., Ferreira, J.M.F., Fonseca, A.T. and Lyckfeldt, O. (1998), Inuence of particle size distribution on colloidal processing of alumina, Journal of the European Ceramic Society, Vol. 18, pp. 249-53.

Corresponding author
Dichen Li can be contacted at: xjtudcli@sina.com

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