"The art of planning and developing a casting project" was the title of a talk given by Dr. Ralf Gerke-Cantow at the foundry meet-up of the VDG regional groups for Bavaria and Hesse on October 12 in Kitzingen at Franken Guss GmbH & Co. KG.

It was a great pleasure for us to present to our interested audience the evaluation of a casting geometry with regard to castability as well as its optimization and the systematic development of a casting concept with the help of Visiometa's process planning software. Visiometa enables the foundryman to develop a robust solution with the customer right from the RFQ stage, as the iterative workflow when preparing a quotation can be considerably accelerated by fast modulus analysis on any modern computer hardware. The software therefore allows true real-time collaboration with the customer.

In addition to a site presentation and factory tour of the iron foundry, there was also a second talk by Dr. W. Knothe on how the metal casting process enables the load-based design of structural parts. We would like to thank the organizers from VDG and Franken Guss for the wonderful opportunity to speak and the enjoyable evening.