The sand mold press casting method is a novel iron casting process, which has developed by our group in recent years. The proposed method can cast iron into complex shapes with a high yield over 90% and produces high-quality products by filling control of molten metal during pressing motion. However, molten metal inside mold is cooled down by heat transfer to the molds and atmosphere, and often causes solidification before the end of press. Then, the pressing movement of the upper mold is blocked by the solidified metal. Therefore, to avoid the solidification during pressing sand mold, metal temperature must be heated properly to estimate the filling temperature decrease behavior based on analysis results of CFD simulator, FLOW-3D. The necessary condition not to solidify molten metal before the end of press has been found. It was made clear that the mold must be heated up to the necessary temperature beforehand in the pressing process. Furthermore, optimum velocity reference with specified pressure constraints has been designed to prevent casting defect such as penetration and also to minimize the temperature decrease. In this paper, optimum velocity control of servo cylinder considering the both of allowable pressure of molten metal and starting time of solidification is proposed by using a theoretical approach of Model Predictive Control: MPC method. The effectiveness of the proposed control system has been demonstrated by computer simulation and experiments using a laboratory scale machine with molten metal of casting iron.
Pressing Control Design Based on Analysis of Metal Temperature and Flow in Sand Mold Press Casting