Material Performance

Get this comprehensive report documenting the results of an investigation into the influence of sand types on foundry productivity and the surface quality of mold packages and castings!

The Customer Applications Team at ExOne in Germany, in cooperation with the German iron foundry Nehr + Saurer, conducted a series of tests to evaluate whether different types of sand in terms of their material properties (grain size and compaction) affect: 

1) The foundry productivity in terms of production output and machine payback time, as well as 

2) The surface quality of the mold packages and castings of exhaust pipes (test geometry). 

The mold packages were 3D printed on the ExOne S-Max® Pro sand binder jet system using furan binder and four different sand grades (three silica sands with varying grain sizes and CERABEADS® X synthetic sand). All tests were carried out without any coating (core wash) as it mainly determines the formation of the surface finish. 

Download the whitepaper to discover the results of the tests.