Excursion to foundry Koncast GmbH

The seven winners of the case study “Quality Assurance in Metal Casting”, which is a part of the lecture “Production Technology”, got the opportunity to visit the partner company KONCAST GmbH on December 13th, 2019.

The visit to the aluminum foundry specializing in prototype and small batch production started with a presentation about the company itself, as well as the parent Böllinger Group. A topic of special interest was the comparison between 3D-printing and metal casting.

During the following tour of the company, the students experienced the process of metal casting at first hand: from molding, over the preparation and treatment of the melt, to the actual casting process using low pressure and gravity casting.

Much appreciated was the fact that student were divided into two group, so that everybody had the opportunity to ask questions.

In the ensuing technical discussion, the differences between small batch production using sand molds, as done at KONCAST, was compared to mass production using steel molds.

Once all the questions had been answered comprehensively, the journey back to Darmstadt began.

During the trip home, the students summed up the field trip and were thrilled to have experienced the real world application to the theory learned in the lecture hall.

We would like to take this chance to thank KONCAST once more and especially Mr. Ruoff for the support during the preparation and realization of this case study.