Miniaturized Cast Metal Integrated Components

Investment castings have well served both the military and commercial markets in such areas as waveguides and splitters for microwave applications, and for connectors, housings, heat sinks and mechanical parts for electronics, optical, instrumentation, and medical devices. Tomorrow's higher RF millimeter wave and communications electronics products, and more compact optical, instrumentation and medical apparatus have unique design requirements that require cast components with finer features held in better alignment with thinner walls and smaller cells held in flatter array with almost no dimensional variation. These attributes cannot be achieved by present manufacturing methods. The objective of this Phase I project will be to demonstrate that the lighter, stronger, thinner components required for these advanced products can be produced economically as almost net shape investment cast components by employing certain novel methods with which we have been experimenting and engineering. By the end of this project we will have benchmarked present process capability and have demonstrated, on actual concurrently engineered parts, the feasibility and capability of the new methods to produce the required advanced components. Significant reductions in wall thickness, size variation and cost can be achieved. The proposed effort is embedded in Raytheon's TRP proposal. Anticipated Benefits: Completion of Phase I will point the way to providing smaller and more precise cast metal components than have been economically available previously, in support of efforts in the electronics industry to downsize, integrate and economize products.