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The research deals with the evaluation of internal quality of zinc castings in terms of porosity. The castings were produced by high-pressure die casting from ZP0410 alloy, which is an alloy of zinc with addition of aluminium and copper. For the evaluation, a computed tomography was used on a Werth Tomoscope XL, which allows for a non-destructive analysis of the internal structure of the casting and the creation of a 3D model of the porosity distribution inside of the casting. It also allows the number of cavities and the proportion of porosity in the casting volume to be determined. Castings from a two-cavity mould were evaluated. The mould is made of H11 steel. The investigation of the internal structure was carried out on castings from both cavities of the mould during its service life. Three samples of castings from each cavity were taken from a new mould and then after approximately every 100,000 shots up to 700,000 shots. Evaluation by computed tomography revealed that microporosity was present inside the whole casting. Larger cavities are generally found around the central hole in the area of the highest wall thickness. The number of cavities was different for the two positions of the castings up to 400,000 shots, with the number increasing for K3 castings and varying between increasing and decreasing for K4 castings. After reaching 400,000 shots the number of cavities in castings matched and a decrease to approximately 2,000 occurred. The volume of porosity at 700,000 shots was 0.4%.
Keywords: Die casting, zinc alloy, computed tomography, porosity, mould wear© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.