The industrial shift towards e-mobility is an opportunity for high pressure die castings (HPDC) components, such as motor housings, gearboxes and covers. Using high strength magnesium alloys for structural castings reduces the weight in lightweight constructions.

To manufacture high quality castings with low amounts of internal defects the casting processes have been redeveloped over the past years. One of these is the Vacural® die casting process from Oskar Frech GmbH that supplies best possible casting quality.

The new application requires high mechanical properties such as yield strength and fatigue strength and elongation.

In the project “InDrutec-E”, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, HPDC parts from three magnesium alloys have been produced at Aalen University and investigated by DLR. These alloys have been cast using vacuum assisted die casting and the Vacural® die casting process. The goal was to study the influence of the quality gained by the redeveloped casting process as well as the mechanical properties of the three alloys.

In order to do this, test samples have been machined out of plates and analyzed with respect to quasi static and fatigue data.

This paper will point out a selection of these results and highlight the different values of tensile and fatigue strength of the magnesium alloys. The results will show that the Vacural® process offers the best possible mechanical properties compared to other die casting processes.