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Occupational safety and health experts have been studying the potential hazards to employees at foundry workplaces for many decades. Besides hazards presented by noise, heat and similar effects, the exposure to chemical substances is also particularly significant. During casting, thermal stress causes volatile pyrolysis products to be formed from the organic binders which are used. As is almost always the case in pyrolysis processes, the mixtures formed from decomposition products are very complex, and in the majority of cases their qualitative and, in particular, quantitative composition can generally be predicted only very vaguely, if at all. IfG, the institute for foundry technology in Düsseldorf, has therefore conducted a project involving standardized casting tests performed in a pilot facility on the most significant common mould systems. The pyrolysis gases formed during the casting process and the subsequent cooling process were collected by means of different sampling systems and analysed, at the BGIA - Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, both by screening analyses and selectively for hazardous substances such as aromatic amines, isocyanates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, aldehydes and carbon monoxide. Besides describing the principles of casting technology and the test apparatus used, this report summarizes the results for the major binder systems. In addition, the BGIA's MEGA database of exposure data was queried for relevant hazardous substances arising during casting. |