Steel Manufacturing Simulation and Visualization Consortium

A Baker’s Dozen Quick Heat Treat News Items to Keep You Current

/ FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT NEWS INDUSTRIES

A Baker’s Dozen Quick Heat Treat News Items to Keep You Current

Heat Treat Today offers News Chatter, a feature highlighting representative moves, transactions, and kudos from around the industry.

Personnel and Company Chatter

  • Kestrel Company, an investment corporation founded by Shelby Ray, has purchased the remaining assets of Eagle Steel Products from Shirley Ohta, who founded Eagle in 1982. The new ownership, led by Ray, expects to maintain its woman- and minority-owned business status. Eagle operates a steel and metal products warehousing and distribution facility in Louisville, Kentucky.Kestrel Company will be doing business as Eagle Steel & Metal Products.
  • Jerram Dawes has recently joined Phoenix Temperature Measurement (PhoenixTM) as Sales Manager, bringing 20 years experience of working for a well-known temperature profiling equipment supplier.
  • Kimberly A. Fields recently joined Allegheny Technologies Incorporated (ATI) as Executive Vice President with full P&L responsibility for the Flat-Rolled Products Group, succeeding Robert S. Wetherbee, who held this role until becoming ATI’s President and CEO. Ms. Fields brings 20 years of global experience with a focus on growth and operational excellence.
  • After almost 9 months away from the company, Ed Valykeo has recently returned to Pelican Wire as the company’s thermocouple specialist. With almost four decades of experience in the wire manufacturing space, Ed is recognized as an industry expert within the thermocouple wire manufacturing world. In his career, Ed has been an active member of ASTM for over twenty-five years and spent almost two decades in various technical positions at Hoskins Manufacturing, an industry pioneer.
  • American Posts LLC has acquired Ohio-Kentucky Steel, which provides slitting of steel and aluminum. American Posts, LLC was established in March 2005 and is the last manufacturer of steel u-posts in the United States.
  • Brelie Gear Co, Inc. has announced plans to build a new 36,800 sq. ft. facility on a recently purchased 4.3-acre site in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Brelie will be moving from their current plant in Milwaukee to the new, larger plant. The new larger space will continue to run as a full-service gear manufacturing facility that houses the latest in equipment technology and automation.
  • Sage Metals Private Ltd., a portfolio company of Delos Capital and a manufacturer of specialty metal products, has acquired Jayco Manufacturing. Based in Grand Prairie, Texas, Jayco is involved in the assembly, integration, and production of precision custom metal-formed components for a variety of industrial and consumer end markets.

 

Equipment Chatter

  • A 2-zone indirect gas-fired heavy duty walk-in furnace was recently shipped to a global manufacturer in the composite industry. Wisconsin Oven Corporation announced that this project passed the stringent temperature uniformity requirements to meet BAC 5621 Class 1 Furnaces and Instrumentation Type D specifications.
  • A vacuum purge semi-continuous Active Only® CAB furnace was recently commissioned by SECO/WARWICK for a North American automotive aftermarket manufacturer.
  • Nucor Steel Marion, Inc., based in Marion, Ohio, granted SMS group the Final Acceptance Certificate (FAC) of the supplied walking beam furnace shortly after successful commissioning. The NOx content of this furnace is close to 25 parts per million. The furnace is designed according to innovative pre-fabrication methods and features proprietary SMS ZEROFlame burners.
  • Five Blue M Standard mechanical convection ovens were recently shipped to a global manufacturer of automotive parts by Thermal Product Solutions.

Kudos Chatter

  • The Powder Coating Institute (PCI) recently introduced the third video in the Powder Coating, A Better Kind of Paint consumer video series. Powder Coating: A Stronger Kind of Paint rounds out the “Stronger, Greener, Better” portion of the series. PCI also introduced a PCI Certification Program promotional video, which features three PCI certified companies sharing the benefits of certification and their experience with the process.
  • The HPC4Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) Program recently awarded nearly $3.8 million for thirteen projects designed to stimulate the use of high-performance supercomputing in U.S. manufacturing. These projects will address key challenges in U.S. manufacturing proposed in partnership with companies and improve energy efficiency across the manufacturing industry through applied research and development of energy technologies. Each of the thirteen newly selected projects will receive up to $300,000 to support work performed by the national lab partners and allow the partners to use HPC compute cycles. Awardees include: (1) Arconic Inc. will partner with ORNL to model rolling processes to observe the evolution of porosity in a project titled “Computational Modeling of Industrial Rolling Processes Incorporating Microstructure Evolution to Minimize Rework Energy Losses”. (2) United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) will partner with ORNL to understand microstructure evolution during heat treatment of additively manufactured parts in a project titled “Predictive Tools for Customizing Heat Treatment of Additively Manufactured Aerospace Components”. (3) Steel Manufacturing Simulation and Visualization Consortium (SMSVC) and ArcelorMittal USA will partner with ANL to improve the efficiency of the reheat furnace process in steel manufacturing in a project titled “Application of High-Performance Computing (HPC) to Optimize Reheat Furnace Efficiency in Steel Manufacturing”.

 

 

Heat Treat Today is pleased to join in the announcements of growth and achievement throughout the industry by highlighting them here on our News Chatter page. Please send any information you feel may be of interest to manufacturers with in-house heat treat departments especially in the aerospace, automotive, medical, and energy sectors to the editor at editor@heattreattoday.com.

 

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Heat Treating, Metals Projects Included in DOE Program to Advance U.S. Manufacturing

/ ENERGY HEAT TREAT, FEATURED NEWS

 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced the selection of 13 projects to stimulate the use of high-performance supercomputers to advance U.S. manufacturing. Heat treating research and development programs are among the finalists.

The Energy Department, in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has set aside nearly $3 million in funding for the manufacturing-laboratory partnerships to assist the U.S. in bringing technologies to the market faster and gain a competitive advantage in the global economy.

Included in the list are heat treating or metals production companies with the following planned projects:

  • United Technologies Research Center – This project will develop a novel heat treatment scheme that eliminates deleterious phases from the microstructure additively manufactured aerospace components while reducing the annealing time.
  • SFP Works, LLC – This project will use computational effort to understand phase transformations that occur during the flash heat treating process in order to better control parameters to obtain the desired phase distribution and chemistry.
  • Arconic, Inc – This project will study the thermomechanics of micro-pores during the rolling process of aluminum slabs to improve yield.
  • Steel Manufacturing Simulation and Visualization Consortium – This project will create a shared database of heat exchange in 140 steel reheat furnaces whose inconsistencies lead to significant energy loss.

Selected projects will be awarded up to $300,000 in federal funding to cover the costs associated with using the supercomputers and technical expertise provided by the laboratory partners. Industry partners will provide a participant contribution of at least 20% of the DOE funding for the project.

DOE’s national laboratories have some of the most significant high performance computing (HPC) resources available, including some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. There is great potential for the U.S. manufacturing industry to use the power of HPC to solve key challenges, but many manufacturers lack access to supercomputing resources.

The High-Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program, supported by DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, unites DOE’s supercomputing capabilities and expertise with American manufacturers to optimize production processes and designs, enhance product quality, predict performance and failure, and speed up design and testing cycles while decreasing energy consumption. Manufacturer-laboratory partnerships leverage expertise in advanced modeling, simulation, and data analysis to accelerate innovation and shorten the time of adoption of new technologies in U.S. manufacturing.

The following projects were also selected for awards:

  • 3M – This project will optimize the design of emissive films on building windows for cooling via modeling of glass bead filled polymers.
  • 3M – This project will minimize energy consumption of the fiber spinning manufacturing process using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and machine learning.
  • Alliance for Pulp & Paper Technology – This project will help create a fundamental understanding of alkali reactivity with wood components using molecular modeling.
  • GE Global Research Center – This project will extend GE Global Research Center’s TRUCHAS model to large-scale casting simulation of turbine blades.
  • KeraCel – This project will model a new plan to push energy density in Li batteries with lithium oxide garnet with the goal of lowering the required temperature to reduce porosity in sintering.
  • Seurat Technologies – This project will use the ALE3D software to optimize Seurat’s innovative laser energy flux distribution to reduce spatter during laser powder bed fusion.
  • The Dow Chemical Company – This project will model methods to reduce the thermal conductivity of Dow’s insulating foam polyurethane products while using less polymer in products.
  • Transient Plasma Systems – This project will build a comprehensive numerical model for use in understanding and optimizing key parameters in electrical pulse generation of plasmas for dilute burn combustion.
  • VAST Power Systems, Inc. – This project will optimize gas turbine combustors by developing and validating surrogate models using CFD.

Read more about the individual projects on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s High-Performance Computing for Manufacturing website and at the Department of Energy’s website.

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