MW-ICP

MICROWAVE CURING OF 3D PRINTED SAND CORES

3D printing or Additive Manufacturing is an emerging technology, which, using sand as a raw material, enables sand cores with significant advantages over traditional methods to be manufactured. Aware of this enormous potential, LORAMENDI began working in this field in 2017, seeking 3D industrial sand manufacturing to obtain cores. Therefore, ICP - INDUSTRIALIZATION OF CORE PRINTING, the world's first fully automated integrated 3D printed sand core production solution, was presented at GIFA 2019, offering a serialised process capable of competing with today's mass production. However, the traditional post-processing of core manufacturing by 3D printing in operation with Drying and Curing equipment requires considerable energy consumption (15 kWh/cycle on equipment designed to operate 24 hours a day) and a cycle time that can be improved by about 25 minutes overall. The energy cost, and therefore the cost per part, of the cores is quite high and the process needs to be improved.

LORAMENDI, a company whose activity focuses on the design and supply of global foundry solutions, has developed MW-ICP. BEMENS, a company specialised in the industrialisation of processes that apply microwave technology, and IK INGENIERÍA, an environmental consultancy firm specialising in Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), have been involved in its development.