Two committees of the American Foundry Society are offering a new specification guide for engineers and buyers of castings. The AFS Ductile Iron and Gray Iron Research Committees have released a new Strain-Life Fatigue Properties Database for Cast Iron, a database that represents the capability of the domestic casting industry. The database is the product of a five-year partnership between AFS and the U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Industrial Technology.

Included in the database is information on 22 "carefully specified and produced castings from ASTM/SAE standard grades of iron, including austempered gray iron (specification is under development)."

AFS says each grade is described comprehensively, with chemical and microstructural analysis, hardness tests, monotonic tension tests, and compression tests. The information is contained in MS Word and Excel files on two CD-ROMs, so it can be exported to CAD software.

For more information, contact Joe Santner at Tel. 800-537-4237, ext. 264, or jss@afsinc.org. To order, contact AFS's publications department, ext. 241; or, visit www.afsinc.org/estore/ -- reference publication RR0300.