About Foundry

Foundry

Overview and identity

Foundry is a Chinese-language journal of casting science and technology published in Shenyang, Liaoning, in northeastern China. Its Chinese title is Zhuzao, and it carries the ISSN 1001-4977. It is one of China's longest-running specialist journals in any branch of manufacturing, having been founded in 1952. That founding date places it in the first generation of technical periodicals created after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, when the new state was building a modern heavy-industry base and needed Chinese-language channels through which plant engineers and researchers could exchange practical and scientific knowledge.

The journal is published in association with two Shenyang-centred institutions: the Shenyang Research Institute of Foundry and the foundry institution of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society, often rendered in English as the Foundry Institution of CMES. International listings, including Scopus source listings, record the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society in connection with the title, and those listings gave the journal a CiteScore of 0.2 in the 2025 metrics cited in directory summaries. The Scopus coverage recorded for Zhuzao is not continuous across its whole life, as is common for Chinese-language titles: directory summaries record active years of 1987 to 1989, 1998, and 2001 onward. Readers should therefore distinguish the journal's long print history, which runs from 1952, from the shorter and interrupted windows in which international abstracting services have covered it.

Shenyang and the foundry research institute

Shenyang is one of the historic centres of Chinese heavy industry, and its role in casting research is anchored by the Shenyang Research Institute of Foundry, founded in 1957. The institute was created five years after the journal itself, and the two have grown up together: the journal gave the emerging foundry research community a national voice, and the institute gave the journal an editorial home grounded in laboratory and pilot-plant work rather than in purely academic study. That pairing of a research institute and a professional-society branch is characteristic of China's specialist engineering press, and it explains much of the journal's character. Its pages have historically served readers who move between research institutes, universities and production foundries.

Liaoning's industrial setting also matters. The northeast was the heartland of China's early steel, machinery and equipment industries, and foundries there supplied castings for machine tools, mining and transport equipment, and heavy plant. A Shenyang-based casting journal was therefore positioned close to demanding users of cast components, and its subject matter has always had to answer to production realities: melt quality, mould performance, dimensional accuracy and cost, as well as to metallurgical theory.

Scope: the whole casting process

Foundry covers the casting process as an integrated whole. Its stated subject areas include melting, moulding materials and moulding practice, cast iron and cast steel, nonferrous casting, precision casting and other special casting processes, and foundry equipment and automation. That breadth distinguishes it from narrower titles devoted to a single alloy family or a single process. A reader of Foundry can expect, within a single volume, work on how a melt is prepared and treated, how a mould is made and how it behaves, and how the resulting casting performs.

Melting coverage addresses the furnace practice and melt treatment on which all later quality depends: charge materials, melting and holding, inoculation and modification treatments for cast irons, refining and degassing practice, and the control of composition and temperature before pouring. Moulding coverage addresses sands, binders and coatings, core making, moulding lines and the behaviour of mould materials during pouring and solidification. Together these topics reflect a basic truth of foundry work that the journal's structure embodies: most casting defects originate before or during mould filling, so melting and moulding deserve as much scientific attention as the solidified product.

Cast iron, cast steel and nonferrous casting

The journal's alloy coverage spans the three great families of cast metals. For cast iron, the central concerns of the field include graphite morphology and matrix structure in grey and ductile irons, the control of shrinkage and feeding, and the properties required for machine-tool beds, engine components, pipes and heavy machinery parts. For cast steel, the recurring themes are cleanliness, solidification control, heat treatment and the demanding service conditions of large steel castings. For nonferrous casting, the journal covers the casting of aluminium, magnesium, copper and other nonferrous alloys, where melt protection, oxide control and pressure-assisted processes take on particular importance.

Keeping these families in one journal has a practical logic. Many Chinese foundries cast more than one family of metals, and many problems — gating and feeding design, solidification simulation, defect diagnosis, testing and quality control — cross alloy boundaries. Foundry's generalist structure lets a method developed for one alloy be read, tested and adapted by specialists in another, which is one reason a general casting title founded in 1952 has remained useful alongside the more specialised journals that appeared later.

Precision and special casting, equipment and automation

Alongside conventional sand casting, Foundry covers precision casting and special casting processes. Precision casting, including investment casting, serves components whose shape and surface finish must be achieved largely in the as-cast state, while special processes cover the range of methods developed where ordinary sand casting cannot meet requirements for density, accuracy or alloy performance. By carrying this material, the journal connects the high-volume world of general foundry production with the higher-value world of precision components for machinery, energy and transport applications.

Equipment and automation form the other forward-looking strand of the journal's scope. Foundry work is labour-intensive and sensitive to process variation, so mechanised moulding, automated pouring, robotic handling and finishing, process monitoring and computer simulation of filling and solidification have been recurring concerns of the Chinese foundry industry. A journal that covers both the metallurgy and the machinery of casting can follow a technical change from laboratory demonstration to production line, and that production orientation has been a consistent feature of the Shenyang title's identity among Chinese mechanical-engineering journals.

Standing, indexing and readership

Foundry is recognised in China as a Chinese core journal, a status that reflects its standing in the national system by which leading journals in each discipline are identified. Its international visibility is more modest, as the Scopus record summarised above suggests: coverage in the late 1980s, in 1998 and from 2001 onward, with a CiteScore of 0.2 recorded for 2025 in directory listings. That combination — high domestic standing, modest international citation metrics — is typical of Chinese-language applied engineering journals whose primary audience is a national industry rather than the global research system. Judging the journal only by international metrics would miss its actual function, which is to circulate verified casting knowledge among Chinese researchers and foundry engineers in the language in which they work.

The readership implied by the journal's scope is correspondingly practical. It includes researchers at foundry and materials institutes, university metallurgists working on solidification and cast alloys, and engineers responsible for melting, moulding and quality in production foundries. Papers in such a journal are expected to be usable: a treatment that improves melt quality, a moulding material that reduces defects, or an equipment change that stabilises production is of direct value to that audience, whether or not it attracts citations abroad.

Relationship to CHINA FOUNDRY and to other casting titles

Care is needed not to confuse this journal with CHINA FOUNDRY, the English-language journal with print ISSN 1672-6421 founded in 2004. CHINA FOUNDRY is a separate title in the same agency family — the Foundry Journal Agency associated with the Foundry Institution of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society publishes both — but the two journals differ in language, founding date, ISSN and readership. Foundry (Zhuzao, ISSN 1001-4977) is the Chinese-language journal founded in 1952 for the domestic foundry community; CHINA FOUNDRY is the much younger English-language title created to present Chinese foundry research to a worldwide readership. Bibliographic records, citations and library holdings for the two should never be merged.

Foundry also differs from Special Casting and Nonferrous Alloys, the Xiangyang-based journal covered separately in WorldNM's listings. That title, founded in 1980, concentrates on special processes and nonferrous alloys, whereas Foundry is the general casting journal, covering iron and steel as fully as nonferrous metals and conventional processes as fully as special ones. The two titles are complementary products of the same professional community — the foundry institution of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society is associated with both — but they are distinct journals with distinct ISSNs, cities and editorial emphases.

Why Foundry matters

Foundry matters first for its longevity. A specialist manufacturing journal founded in 1952 and still recorded as active in international listings more than seven decades later documents, in its own run of volumes, the transformation of Chinese casting from early industrial practice to a modern, simulation- and automation-assisted industry. Few branches of Chinese engineering possess so continuous a Chinese-language record, and historians of technology as well as practising engineers have reason to value it.

It matters, second, for its institutional model. Anchored by the Shenyang Research Institute of Foundry, founded in 1957, and by the foundry institution of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society, the journal embodies the link between a national research institute, a professional society and an industry readership. For readers outside China trying to understand how Chinese engineering knowledge is organised, Foundry is a clear example: a society-and-institute journal, published in a historic industrial city, covering an entire process chain from melting to automation, and holding core-journal standing at home while maintaining a documented, if interrupted, presence in Scopus. That is the accurate profile of Zhuzao — and it should be kept carefully separate from its younger English-language relative, CHINA FOUNDRY.