Nowadays, there are growing demands on the accuracy of production. Most of this is reflected in precise manufacturing, such as the investment casting process. Foundries are looking for causes of defects in some cases for a very long time, and it may happen that the source of defects is completely different from what was originally assumed. During the casting process there exist potential causes of defects as oxygen inclusions. This paper represents a summary of the beginnings of a wider research that will address the problems of gating systems in investment casting technology. In general, the influence of the melt flow is underestimated and the aim of the whole scientific research is to demonstrate the significant influence of laminar or turbulent flow on the resulting casting quality. Specifically, the paper deals with the analysis of the most frequent types of defects found in castings made of expensive types of materials casted in an open atmosphere and demonstration of connection with the design of gating systems in the future.

With increasing technology development, an increasing emphasis is placed on the precision of products, but cannot be guaranteed without a stable production process. To ensure the stability of the production process, it is necessary to monitor it in detail, find its critical locations and eliminate or at least control it. With such a precise manufacturing method as investment casting, such a process is a must. This paper therefore deals with monitoring the production process of wax models of large turbine blades using infrared thermography. The aim was to evaluate the critical locations of this production and to propose recommendations for their elimination or, at the very least, significant mitigation of their impact on the final quality of the large turbine blade casting.

Precision casting is currently motivated by high demand especially for castings for the aerospace, automotive and gas turbine industries. High demands on precision of this parts pressure foundries to search for the new tools which can help them to improve the production. One of these tools is the numerical simulation of injection process, whereas such software especially for investment casting wax injection, process does not exist yet and for this case must be the existing software, for alloys or plastic, modified. This paper focuses on the use of numerical simulations to predict the behavior of injected models of gas turbine blades segments. The properties of wax mixtures, which were imported into the Cadmould simulation software as a material model, were found. The results of the simulations were verified using the results of 3D scanning measurements of wax models. As a supporting technology for verifying the results was used the Infrared Thermography.