The Impact of Major Alloying Elements and Refiner on the SDAS of Al-Si-Cu Alloy

Abstract This paper investigates the effect of some major alloying elements (silicon and copper) and the effect of grain refiner (titanium boride) on the size of the secondary dendrite arm spacing (SDAS) in series of Al-Si-Cu alloys. It has been shown that both silicon and copper have significant influence on this solidification parameter. The addition of grain refining master alloys to aluminium alloys is common practice in many commercial foundries aiming to reduce the grain size of Al-Si alloys. However, it was shown in the present paper that master alloy based on TiB had an unexpected impact on the SDAS, decreasing the size of SDAS. In addition, there is a minimum of SDAS corresponding to the presence of 0.12 wt% of titanium in Al-Si alloy. Such findings could have important implications for Al-Si alloys in particular, due to their wide spread applications in the automotive industry.