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The cooling control of the melt during the casting process is of great significance. A comprehensive closed-loop cooling control of castings by adopting a skeletal sand mold design was proposed. The skeletal sand mold consisting of an adaptive shell, functional cavities and a support was designed and created based on the finite difference meshes of a casting. It was applied to a round wall test casting. Two kinds of skeletal sand molds, one with lattice support and the other with enforcing ribs for this casting were designed and printed out by the 3D printing (3DP) method. Aluminum alloy A356 was cast by using these two sand molds. The first mold was cooled by natural convection, the other one by water spray cooling. Two sound castings were obtained. The sand mold temperature, cooling curves, microstructures, mechanical properties, residual stress and deformation were measured, compared and discussed. Water spray cooling hastened the cooling rate by 62％, increased the content of Mg and Cu in the α-Al matrix, improved the mechanical properties, and altered the surface residual stress state.