A friend visited a large iron foundry in the South of the country last week and asked about ductile iron additives/innoculants and how they made theirs. The reply was "Nah they might have used that stuff years ago but we make ours with silicon carbide". Keep in mind this is a foundry large enough to have their own quality control testing lab that checks everything from casting sand to raw materials in the lab to maintain quality. This put me back in mind of an Iranian paper I linked to earlier where they show ductile iron being made with 0.3% silicon carbide alone: https://foundrygate.com/upload/artigos/cwvdHuZP6Rdfod5sCbaSgtTLXI35.pdf The first sample micro-photograph shows nodular graphite with 0.3% silicon carbide and no Zircinoc commercial ductile iron additive. Anyway it looks like further experiments will be required .
Oh definitely!, I have several aluminium castings to do first and then a test run of the furnace without the refractory disc and only the air nozzle so I'll give it a go then. I'm assuming that any cast sample that can be bent to any degree must be ductile iron?.
