Aluminum-Silicon Casting Alloys

The Aluminum-Silicon Casting Alloys Atlas of Microstructures provides any engineer or researcher who works with aluminum castings with a practical and substantive tool for the visual analysis of the microscopic images of the microstructure of the aluminum casting alloys, as examined during routine laboratory procedures. The gallery of microstructure images presented in the Atlas has been selected and put in a systematic order with two main goals in mind

• Help the reader who has an image of an alloy microstructure identify the examined alloy in a gallery of standard casting Al-Si alloys
• Help the reader to identify the typical microstructure of an alloy based on its estimated cooling rate

The Atlas was composed considering the cast part as a complex construction of crystallites, described in the context of particular technological conditions and initial chemical composition. Chapters I and II discuss the characteristics of the main phase constituents: ?-Al solid solution and silicon crystals (Ch. I), and intermetallic phases (Ch. II). Chapter III presents an atlas of the microstructures of Al-Si cast parts, designated according to standard PN EN 1706, taking into account its counterparts in ASTM-standards. Chapter IV presents the metallographic procedure of the visual identification of the alloy phase constituents.