| Des Plaines, IL. In order to facilitate better decisions regarding material selections and component designs, a new interactive website, www.ironcastings.org, has been unveiled by the Cast Iron Marketing Committee (5-M) of the American Foundry Society (AFS). This free online resource allows engineers to quickly create side-by-side material property comparisons between cast metals and other materials for a more informed material selection decision.
When designers do not have access to full comparative property data, a material or process selection often results in a sub optimized design. This results not only in higher costs, but also designs that are unsuited for the intended application, or those that have not considered cast-in features or part consolidations. The website is a tool to gain that knowledge.
Conceived by previous Committee Chairman John Keough of Applied Process and coordinated by his staff, the site is linked to MatWeb, a comprehensive database of more than 33,000 metals, plastics, ceramics and composites.
"Our committee set out to provide a tool that design engineers could use to compare the engineering characteristics of today's cast irons-and all metals for that matter-against alternative materials," said Committee Chairman Ken Moore, Interstate Castings, Indianapolis.
In addition to its use for the component designer, metal casting engineering and sales personnel are also encouraged to use the web-based tool to collect information that can be useful in stating castings' attributes to customers.
Founding sponsors of the site include: Applied Process, Inc.; Bremen Castings, Inc.; Citation Corp., Ductile Iron Society, Engineered Casting Solutions; Gartland Foundry; Interstate Castings; Metal Technologies Group and Siempelkamp.
For more information about the AFS Cast Iron Marketing Committee and its projects, contact committee liaison Mike Lessiter at mlessiter@afsinc.org.
Headquartered in Des Plaines, Illinois, AFS is a not-for-profit technical and management society that has existed since 1896 to provide and promote knowledge and services that strengthen the metal casting industry for the ultimate benefit of its customers and society.
Shown is a screen capture of www.ironcastings.org.
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