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Aluminum would be an outstanding material for engine blocks and their associated components. It is light, versatile, easy to work with, and cost effective. Now if only it did not fail at the high temperatures and pressures to be found under the hood.

That shortcoming has overshadowed the virtues of aluminum for most manufacturers. However, Dr. Jerry Sokolowski and his team are well on their way to solving this problem. As leader of the project Advanced Light Metal Casting and Materials Development, he is guiding research into a new generation of aluminum alloys that are ready to be used in the most hard-working engines.

"We have a process that has exhibited profound improvements in all as-cast structures, to a level that has never been seen in any sand-casting to date," he says. More specifically, the Nemak plant in Windsor was recently able to turn out aluminum engine blocks with 70 per cent less porosity than before, and a 40 per cent improvement in high cycle fatigue.

"It was very impressive," says Dr. Sokolowski, who notes that the result caught the attention of representatives from Volkswagen, one of the few manufacturers currently using aluminum in engines.

This success follows some intensive studies of alloys using varying amounts of copper and silicon, as well as different cooling rates for the castings. The centrepiece of this work has been a collection of alloys known as the 3xx.x series, which proved durable enough to be used in cylinder liners.

This considerable volume of analyses was made possible by Dr. Sokolowski's use of a compact, self-contained workstation designed and built on campus, turning out small batches of each alloy with maximum efficiency. "It allows us to melt, treat the melt, solidify the melt, and do the heat treatment – the complete cycle," he explains.

Through the AUTO21 Network of Centres of Excellence, this particular project is able to incorporate the efforts of researchers from the University of Windsor, McMaster University, and the CANMET Energy Technology Centre in Ottawa, a research branch of Natural Resources Canada. Sokolowski holds the NSERC/Ford-Nemak/University of Windsor Industrial Research Chair (IRC) in Light Casting Technology, enabling him to bring industrial partners such as Nemak to this work.

Nemak, based in Monterrey, Mexico, is one of the world's leading makers of cast aluminum components. The company, which provides cylinder heads and engine blocks to Ford plants across North America, has also established a major plant in Windsor.

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