Magnesium Casting Processes: The HIMAC Project Re-Assessed

A program within US CAR/US AMP-AMD (United States Car/United States Automotive Materials Partnership — Automotive Materials Division) Project entitled High Integrity Magnesium Automotive Components (HIMAC) was divided into several tasks, some involving the metallurgy of Magnesium casting alloys, and the rest to the production of an automotive control arm casting in AZ91 magnesium alloy by a variety of casting processes. Casting processes included: the Ablation Process, low pressure permanent mold (LPPM), squeeze casting (SC) and T-Mag. LPPM and SC are established processes, whereas the Ablation Process and T-Mag are relatively new processes in the early phases of being productionized. The performance of the castings from the various casting processes was compared. The Ablation Process was found to produce castings with the best combination of strength, ductility, reliability and X-ray soundness. Ablation fatigue resistance showed superior results. However, since ablated specimens did not fail in fatigue, Weibull quantitative results could not be ascertained, whereas, all other processes failure occurred.