Production of Al-7Si-0.3Mg slurry for rheocasting via internal cooling of the melt below the liquidus temperature

Rheocasting is becoming the choice of the casting industry who looks up to semi-solid casting for high integrity structural parts. It is of great technological interest to identify simple methods to prepare slurries at reduced cost. Such a practice based on internal cooling of the melt was employed in the present work to produce Al-7Si-0.3Mg slurries for rheocasting. Al-7Si-0.3Mg melt was cooled internally by dissolving in it a solid block of the same alloy. The non-dendritic morphology in the water-quenched slurry samples seems to imply that dendritic solidification was suppressed once a critical level of initial-primary solidification was achieved.