China’s foundry industry is in a critical period from a big producer to a powerful foundry country. The upgrading of products and the upgrading and transformation of product structure are a challenge to every foundry. The four enterprises in the special report of casting production technology discussion have given us many important inspirations. As any casting, there are always technical requirements and quality standards. Its quality will affect the service quality, safety and service life of the machine. From this point of view, there is no distinction between high and low end castings. However, with the rapid development of China’s economy, all kinds of mechanical and electrical equipment and devices with high performance, high efficiency and high reliability in various economic fields have increasingly improved the quality requirements of castings. Therefore, casting enterprises are required to produce high-quality, high-performance and high-level castings to meet the needs of various industrial fields. These castings are often called “high-end” castings. In summary, high-end castings have three characteristics.
1. The equipment carried by this kind of casting plays an important role in the national economy, and the quality of this kind of casting has a decisive impact on the safety, quality and service life of its constituent equipment. That is to say, the casting plays an important role and the enterprise producing this kind of casting has great responsibility. Take the castings produced by four enterprises at the forum as an example: for example, the bogie axle box on the high-speed train with “zero tolerance” for quality problems; It is required to use the wind power castings that will not be replaced for 20 years on the wind turbine; Machine tool castings for precision CNC machine tools with high carbon equivalent, high strength, high stiffness and low stress; Qt800-5 automobile bracket with high fatigue strength requirements.
2. OEM Industrial Castings have high performance requirements and great manufacturing difficulties. The production enterprises should put the production quality and quality in place at any time, and the quality concept and requirements should be implemented throughout the product production. Some domestic enterprises have insufficient understanding of the technical difficulty and management difficulty of producing high-end castings, and they rush to the market only because of the high price. Instead of working hard to improve the technical level and management level, we took a “shortcut”, first earning orders at low prices, and then producing high-end castings with high quality requirements with low-cost manufacturing and low-level management. As a result, many quality problems even had to be abandoned halfway, which seriously interfered with the production of high-end castings in China and disrupted the market.
Wind power castings, machine tool castings and automobile castings in the previous period all have similar situations. As a result, manufacturers of high-quality castings have invested a lot of quality costs, but low-cost orders have made them unprofitable. Users at home and abroad have also questioned whether China can produce high-end castings, and at the same time, they have misjudged the price positioning of high-end castings. The practice shows that it is not easy to produce high-end castings. Enterprises are required to improve qualitatively in terms of business concept, technical control in the production process and strict quality management. This is a difficult and unavoidable transformation process.
