I’ve written in recent years about how the American steel industry has moved to premium, higher-value products as a route to profitability and survival in the era of low-priced imports and huge buildups of basic steel capacity in China.
One of the companies that has made that transformation is Carpenter Technology. This month Carpenter announced commercialization of a high-strength, cobalt-free alloy called Premomet. The high toughness quenched and tempered alloy is produced in a recently built premium vacuum melt furnace in Reading, PA. It’s aimed at high-demand power train components in heavy-duty diesel engines and other commercial transportation and locomotive applications. It costs less than cobalt alloys. Cobalt prices soared from around $16 per pound in 2005 to more than $40 per pound in 2008, and have fallen considerably this year.
Due to its advanced strength and fracture toughness properties, design engineers can reduce the weight of parts for high-load applications by as much as 25 percent, according to Carpenter. The weight reduction estimates are based on the attainable ultimate tensile strength of 2,040 MPa (296 ksi) combined with the fracture toughness which is much higher than the lower-strength alternatives. Lighter-weight components could result in a reduction of stress on other parts, meaning lower energy consumption throughout a product’s lifecycle.
Carbon content is just 0.40 percent. Its chemistry includes molybdenum, vanadium and manganese. There is some chromium in the alloy, but it is not a stainless and may require plating or coating to resist corrosion. PremoMet is available in bar, hollow bar, wire, strip, plate and billet forms. Patents are pending.
Key property comparisons are indicated in the following table supplied by Carpenter Technology.
Property
Heat-treated steel, e.g. 42CrMo4/4140 25MoCr4/8620
Bearing steel 52100 Fe-1C-1.45Cr
High strength heat-treated steel, e.g. 34CrNiMo6/4340
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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