is confirmed by different
authors in literature. Such result was found for example by
Wessén et al. (2003), Serthucha et al. (2009), and Loper et al. (1967).
It has to be noted that, even if thermal analysis (TA) made on
standard cups has been used since long for characterizing melt
preparation of cast iron, TA is quite unfortunate when dealing
with large melts prepared for thick-wall ductile iron castings. As
a matter of fact, when the cooling rate becomes extremely low,
the solidification microstructure may be affected by magnesium
and inoculation fading, marked intercellular segregation, as well as
graphite degeneracy. An effort was done by Li and Li (2005) in their
work to correlate thermal analysis made on standard cups with the
microstructure in large castings, but it seems unsuccessful in view
of the spreading of the reported data.