Integrated Design of Automotive Castings
As the demand for energy efficiency, environmental protection, and reduced production costs in automobiles continues to increase, leveraging the advantages of casting to integrate several previously separate components-such as those produced by stamping, welding, forging, and casting-through reasonable design and structural optimization can effectively reduce the weight of the components and eliminate unnecessary processing steps. This approach enables the lightweighting and performance enhancement of casting components in automobiles.
The trend of integrated design in automotive castings is particular rly evident in non-ferrous alloy castings. To fully utilize the casting process's ability to produce complex structures, integrated design has been applied to high-pressure castings such as door inner panels, seat frames, dashboard frames, front-end frames, and firewalls. These integrated castings are significantly larger than the currently produced parts and require die-casting machines with capacities of 4,000 to 5,000 tons or even greater for production.
Lightweighting of Automotive Castings
As the need for environmental protection and energy conservation grows, automotive lightweighting has become a global trend in the development of vehicles. The lightweighting of automobile castings and automobile casting components has also become one of the key development directions for automotive castings. Enhancing material performance to allow components to bear higher loads for the same weight is one effective method of reducing casting weight. Structural castings, such as brackets, represent a significant proportion of automotive castings, making their development a focal point. By employing measures such as heat treatment to alter the material's microstructure, the strength, stiffness, or toughness of the parts can be improved, effectively reducing their weight.
Digitalization of Automotive Casting Development
The comprehensive integration of digital technology with automotive casting development can significantly enhance casting technology, shortening product design and trial production cycles.
Overall, digital technology now permeates all aspects of casting design, development, and trial production, effectively increasing the speed and efficiency of casting development. The main challenge currently lies in the independence of digital technologies used in design, analysis, and rapid manufacturing. As the development process transitions from one stage to another, a considerable amount of data conversion is required. In the future, it is hoped that a unified data interface platform will be developed for the digital technologies used in each stage of casting car parts, establishing standardized data conversion protocols and enabling seamless data transfer between different software, thereby further accelerating the development speed of automobile castings.