Tech foundry offers hands-on experience in metal casting
Foundry work was Fred Vondra’s first love.
Vondra, a professor in manufacturing and engineering technology, expects that the foundry on Tennessee Tech’s campus has been active since the 1930s, but it’s been his home for the last 24 years. In his work, Vondra is committed to building industry relationships and improving foundry technology.
“I want to incorporate all the latest technologies that are out there in metal casting,” Vondra said. “Everybody prints plastic. There's technology out there where you can print metal, and you can print sand.”
Tech is a certified Foundry Educational Foundation university, one of only 20 such schools in North America.
“We've got some good company putting out metal casting professions,” Vondra said. “Some of them are metallurgical engineers. Ours are more process people. We get jobs like manufacturing engineers, process engineers, quality people – all important to run a foundry.”
Tech’s foundry is always growing, and Vondra and his students focus their research in materials and tooling.
“Normally we pour three different alloys in this foundry, with the potential for many more, because of the new power supply that we just got in,” Vondra said.
“Everybody's printing now. So, we're looking and doing some experimentation onto different pattern materials.”
For students, that means opportunities to do hands-on work in the foundry.
“We definitely do a lot of hands-on stuff,” said Dave Bogard, senior MET major, who has worked three co-ops in his field of study. That hands-on experience with the fundamentals learned in the classroom prepared him well for those industry experiences and gave him an advantage when taking on new roles in those co-op experiences, he said. “Having foundations for education, that shortened the learning curve dramatically.”
And Vondra is always looking to grow those opportunities for students.“We just created a class in maintenance replacement and reliability where students are coming up with a concept part, and then they are going to print it, and then we're going to cast it,” Vondra explained.
The facility just added a new profilometer, for testing the surface finish of castings as well.
“So, we're doing some pretty cool stuff around here. We're vastly expanding,” Vondra said. “I've got grand aspirations.”