New Approach in Non-Destructive Evaluation Techniques for Automotive Castings

Automotive castings are being utilized increasingly in structurally demanding and safety critical applications. The need for reduced weight, near net shape and more cost effective components has resulted in a desire by the customer to reduce the conservative safety factors previously used for design criteria. The expectation on the metal caster is to supply parts with material and structural properties verified in the product to a high statistical standard. Since the part's quality and integrity are now guaranteed, the historical approach of manual inspection, evaluation and qualitatively based acceptance decisions is being replaced with various approaches to automated evaluation. This presentation will review some of the past requirements and testing approaches used to assure part integrity and compliance. Then it will look at the work of groups like the RISC committee of USAMP/USCAR to make standards more quantitative. This discussion sets the background for introducing PCRI, an NDE (Non Destructive Evaluation) method that evaluates parts not in terms of specific indications, but rather in terms of their structural properties, which better determine fitness for use.