Porosity determination of cast investment by a wax-infiltration technique

A reproducible method of determining the porosity (pore volume) of cast investment materials is described. This procedure, requiring no highly specialized equipment, involved the infiltration of a test sample with paraffin wax and the weighing of the wax-infiltrated sample in both air and water. Pore-volume wax is then extracted with chloroform and the sample reweighed. The difference in weight is used to calculate the porosity of the investment material. Pore-volume data thus obtained are comparable to those resulting from standard techniques and far more sophisticated (and expensive) instrumentation. The porosities of hand-mixed samples of gypsum-bonded, phosphate-bonded and silica-bonded investments were 53.9 per cent, 36.9 per cent and 31.4 per cent and those of the vacuum-mixed samples were 52.5 per cent, 31.3 per cent and 26.9 per cent, respectively. The results show that gypsum-bonded investments were more porous than phosphate-bonded investments while silica-bonded investments were the least porous. Hand-mixed samples appeared to have greater porosity than vacuum-mixed samples.