Kamil Armağan Gül, Eyüp Sabri Kayalı

The industrial practice places a lot of emphasis on the development of lightweight, high-performance materials. When it comes to meet the requirement of volume production and to represent part complexities, Aluminum alloy production and casting are of great interest for their mechanical and lightweight properties. Alloy preparation step and obtain high quality melt for casting is crucial to obtaining the required mechanical and physical properties. Main challenge has been cleaning of the metal melt in order to obtain clean internal structure and resulting properties. Therefore, the most difficult task has been the production and melt treatment step of these alloys. In the present work, high magnesium content aluminum alloys have been fabricated by gravity sand casting method. As melt quality is the most important feature of a successful casting, melt cleanliness has been investigated by reduced pressure test and bifilm count has been measured as the increase in bifilm number has shown a significant decrease in mechanical performance. The performance of the alloys has been assessed by tensile tests. The proper scheme to achieve the highest melt quality has been identified by comparing different melt treatment methods. Moreover, traditional methods such as increased melt holding time and alloying of different elements have not shown an improvement in RPT assessments. On the other hand, rotary degasser method has been observed as ineffective for cleaning of the metal melt because of the turbulence created within the high Mg content. The optimum composition with the highest performance has been proposed.