Smart Foundry

The Caterpillar Smart Foundry, operated by the School of Engineering Technology, is an advanced Industry 4.0 foundry designed to expose a variety of engineering and non-engineering students to an industry comparable manufacturing environment.  This green sand foundry provides real world best practice experience to students in multiple areas such as sand testing, molding, pattern making, ferrous and non-ferrous casting, manual and automated metal pouring, and data collection. This laboratory is a mixed use environment, enabling teaching, research, and volume production all in one facility.

Students will advance through this facility in all four years of their time at Purdue, gradually gaining experience and confidence with the equipment.  As students move forward they will take on more operational responsibility with regards to design, operation, and process improvement.  In their senior year students will take full control of this lab to perform a full product design, launch, testing, and validation as part of a senior capstone.

The laboratory serves:

  • MET 143 (Materials and Processes I)
  • MET 444 (Applied Metallurgy)
  • MET 445 (Projects in Metalcasting)
  • MET 535 (Optimization of Metalcasting Design)

Available Equipment:

  • Simpson 1F Mix-Muller
  • Simpson Hartley compactibility controller
  • Sinto FDNX-1 flaskless matchplate molding machine (16” x 20” x 14”)
  • Palmer CM-25 Coremaker
  • Inductotherm 125 kW VIP-PowerTrak with 300# Duraline induction furnace
  • Thermtronix 660# aluminum dipout furnace
  • ABB 7-axis robot to ladle and pour aluminum from Thermtronix furnace and into molds
  • Various bucket elevators and conveying equipment
  • Various sand testing apparatus
Facility Location Faculty Contact
LMBS B239 Xiaoming Wang, Clayton Kibbey, Milan Rakita, Gozdem Kilaz