Effect of cooling rate on the solidification characteristics and dendrite coherency point of ADC12 aluminum die casting alloy using thermal analysis

In the metal casting industry, an improvement of component quality depends mainly on better control over the production parameters. Thus, computer-aided cooling curve thermal analysis is a very useful method for easy and fast evaluation of a variety of properties. In this work, the effect of different cooling rates (1.2–7.2 °C s−1) on solidification parameters and dendrite coherency point (DCP) of ADC12 aluminum alloy was investigated by thermal analysis. The results revealed that solidification parameters and dendrite coherency point are influenced by variation of cooling rate. Increasing the cooling rate can increase the temperature interval of coherency (T N–T DCP) and coherency fraction solid (\( f_{\text{s}}^{\text{DCP}} \)) about 31 °C and 11 %, respectively, but the coherency time (t DCP) decreases from 130 to 33 s. Therefore, increasing the cooling rate postpones the dendrite coherency, and the dendrites become coherent later.