"Getting under the skin of wear"
€80,000 investment in metallography lab to boost wear parts R&D
Our Technology Center Wheel in Germany has built out its metallography capabilities to accelerate advances in wear parts innovation.
Wheel blast wear parts are a key focus of the center’s R&D activity, they present the fastest route to lowering the running costs of our customers’ wheel blast processes. Over the last few years, we have strengthened the technology center and its testing capabilities specifically to do this.
— Christian Timmer - Global Head of Testing at Wheelabrator“The wear tests commonly done in the industry are complete black boxes. You just run different sets of blades under controlled conditions and see which one lasts the longest. The problem: you never really find out why it lasted longer. We need to know why, so we can optimize.”
Wear parts that improve your process
From testing new materials and geometries to fine-tuning cost performance, the tech center’s mission is to continuously evolve wear parts for our wheels to deliver ever better performance and lower overall running cost on existing machines. Whether it’s through parts that last longer or through new part designs that reduce abrasive and energy consumption.
In order to deliver significant gains through wear parts, the testing team needs ever deeper insights into wear behavior. Insights only metallography can provide at speed.
Faster innovation, beyond wear parts
While the €80,000 investment in the lab was intended primarily to drive continuous, fast innovation on our wear parts, it is already proving popular with customers who want to take a very close look at the parts they’re processing.
Christian concludes: “The new metallography equipment is hugely beneficial in quality control and it has accelerated our R&D cycle dramatically. Where we previously had to wait three weeks for wear tests to complete, we can now cut the part open, polish and see. But it’s also a huge asset for our customers. For example, we’ve just had a medical component in from a customer where we were able to see how effectively their blast process had removed tiny burrs. We can see micro-inclusions and measure even very fine topologies.”
Thanks to the extra laboratory capabilities, customers with wheel blast equipment will see wear parts innovations at a faster clip. Watch this space or speak to your Wheelabrator contact about upcoming releases.