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buyCASTINGS’ Team Proves Castings 
Sound for Vacuum Vessel Use 

A team of experts including Bescast, Finite Solutions, Bastech Engineering, and Atlantic Technical Components came together recently to handle a challenging job for a casting buyer. buyCASTINGS assembled the team and managed the project activities to plan, produce and deliver the 1/10th scale investment cast vacuum vessel based on the vacuum vessel for the National Compact Stellarator Experiment currently being designed by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in partnership with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Atlantic Technical Components coordinated project activities with PPPL.

Shown left is model for the one-tenth (1/10) scale casting of the vacuum vessel. The scale model was investment cast to determine the feasibility of using a casting for a vacuum vessel with complex geometry. The objective was to evaluate a. the ability of the casting process to produce vacuum vessels with complex shapes and b. to evaluate the vacuum properties of the casting.


In order to insure a timely success of the project and to show that castings can be used for virtually any application, a multi-disciplinary team of companies was assembled by buyCASTINGS. To meet the rush timeline, Bastech Engineering of Dayton, Ohio, used SLS rapid prototyping techniques to make the complicated wax patterns from a CAD/STL file in a two-week period.


Using the same STL file, Finite Solutions Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio, used their newly developed FlowCast software to verify the casting process parameters, such as gating, insulation and pour temperatures that Bescast Inc., a Cleveland, Ohio investment casting company, recommended. Finite also modeled several variations of mold and metal temperature to insure that Bescast was well within a capable process window.

With the knowledge in hand that their gating and pour techniques were acceptable, Bescast used a vacuum assist casting method to cast the Inconel 625 air melt alloy with a consistent wall thickness of 0.100”. The entire vessel was to be assembled by welding three equal segments, which were investment cast by Bescast. The shape and dimensional control of the cast parts were very good. The castings exhibited good vacuum properties after several localized areas were repaired by welding. Given these good results, PPPL feels that the original objectives of being able to produce complex shaped investment cast vessels with good vacuum properties were met. 

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