Cast irons

Cast iron offers the design engineer a low-cost, high-strength material that can be easily melted and poured into a wide variety of useful, and sometimes complex, shapes. This latest handbook from ASM covers the entire spectrum of one of the most widely used and versatile of all engineered materials. The reader will find the basic, but vital, information on metallurgy, solidification characteristics, and properties. Extensive reviews are presented on the low-alloy gray, ductile, compacted graphite, and malleable irons. New and expanded material has been added covering high-alloy white irons used for abrasion resistance and high-alloy graphitic irons for heat and corrosion resistance. Also discussed are melting furnaces and foundry practices such as melting, inoculation, alloying, pouring, gating and rising, and molding. Heat treating practices including stress relieving, annealing, normalizing, hardening and tempering, autempering (of ductile irons), and surface-hardening treatments are covered, too. ASM Specialty Handbook: Cast Irons helps the reader learn about routine nondestructive testing to ensure the necessary casting quality, along with failure and metallograph analysis. Finally, property characteristics are thoroughly presented including physical, fatigue and fracture, and elevated-temperature. Contents include: Classification and Basic Metallurgy, Solidification Characteristics, Metallurgy and Properties, Melting Furnaces and Foundry Practices, Heat Treating, Welding and Brazing, Machining and Grinding, Surface Engineering, Inspection and Analysis, Fatigue and Fracture Properties, Elevated-Temperature Properties, Physical Properties, Corrosion Behavior, Index.