Project Summary
The Innovative Castings Enterprise (ICE) is working with ThyssenKrupp Waupaca to investigate taking a welded semi-trailer sand shoe and converting it into a cast component. The current sand shoe design is comprised of a welded assembly with at least two welds and at least three individual parts. The ICE team will determine if eliminating the welds and reducing the number of individual parts will yield a more cost effective sand shoe. If a viable design is developed, this will create new business for ThyssenKrupp.

Project Summary
Caterpillar has software that models dimensional distortions of metal parts during the heat treatment process and wants to verify that the results of the simulation are experimentally accurate. To verify the software, experiments will be run to test how tempering temperature, quench medium, part geometry, and part composition affect the dimensional changes during heat treatment. The aim is to find what factors in heat treating affect dimensional distortion. The information collected will enable Caterpillar’s engineers to verify that the software is accurate as well as provide data on gray iron, for which Caterpillar is currently unable to make such dimensional predictions.

Project Summary
Zinc die cast parts offer many benefits, but low creep resistance has restricted their use to low-temperature applications. A zinc alloy optimized for creep resistance will allow for more applications with stress and elevated temperatures. A survey conducted by the International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZRO) showed that a significant number of engineers in the automotive industry (greater than 50 percent) would benefit from this alloy. The survey found that the alloy would require a stress capability of 31 MPa at a temperature of 140 °C for less than 1,000 hours without 1 creep strain. These properties are not yet attained by zinc alloys, but some improvement may be possible. Any increase in sales would directly benefit zinc die casters, zinc commodity sales, and customers of the zinc die casters, who would also see a decrease in the price of their parts.

Project Summary
Using ultrasonic indications of defects in an aluminum lithium alloy, the microstructural characteristics of the material will be analyzed. Further, mechanical properties of these defects will be related to the defect size and type.

Project Summary
Caterpillar currently uses gray cast iron for many critical power train and structural components. As customers demand higher performance, these materials are exposed to increasingly severe operating conditions. More and more frequently, engineers are considering hybrid approaches such as cast-in-place inserts to meet the requirements for new designs. Accordingly, it is important to know how such casting inserts can be used most effectively. The goal of this project is to make the strongest metallurgical bond between a cast-in-place ferrous insert and a gray iron casting.

Project Summary
United States Steel has proposed the use of their polymercoated steel in the design and production of a nostalgic beverage container. Silgan Container Corporation will provide manufacturing and modeling facilities. The nostalgic can is intended to invoke memoires of pioneer can designs and their manufacturers. The primary target market will be microbreweries. Unlike early can designs, this can will have a polymer interior coating to prevent the historical “iron pickup.” ICP analysis will be used to confirm that iron pickup was avoided. The can will also be re-sealable to help with content preservation. Our can designs are loosely based on the early cone top and Crowntainer cans. The design is significant; corrosion is most likely to occur at the seams, and these cans will be designed to have the fewest seams possible.

Project Summary
Artificial devices, such as electrodes, implanted into the nervous system initiate cell death and trigger an inflammatory response which leads to fibrous encapsulation of the device. This scar inhibits the device both physically and electrically from interacting with the neurons. Hence, biomaterials are being developed that facilitate neuronal integration onto implanted devices. This study introduces a novel sol-gel glass material that incorporates agarose, chitosan, or agarose and chitosan into a silica network. Axons from E9 chick dorsal root ganglia were cultured on sol-gel glasses. Axons on agarose-chitosan sol-gel were two times longer than axons grown on other glass types, and three times longer than axons grown on a laminin control. These promising results warrant further investigation of this material and its potential uses as a coating within the central nervous system.

Project Summary
ICE is a mixture of materials science and mechanical engineering students who are interested in furthering knowledge in the metal casting industry. We work with corporations on research and development of new casting technologies.