Wheelabrator – one of the businesses comprising the Norican Group – recently completed an $85,000 (€80,000) investment to improve the metallography capabilities at its Technology Center in Metelen, Germany, to advance its understanding of wear parts for surface-preparation systems.
Wheel-blast wear parts are a focus area for the research center. “They present the fastest route to lowering the running costs of customers’ wheel-blast processes,” according to Wheelabrator. That explains the need for greater insight to wear behavior, and thereby the metallography for such parts.
“The wear tests commonly done in the industry are complete black boxes,” according to Christian Timmer, Wheelabrator’s global head of testing. “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.”
At the R&D center, the new equipment testing equipment includes cutting, grinding, and polishing tools, and a state-of-the-start digital microscope that the researchers use analyze the microstructure of metallic parts, to evaluate chemistry variations in the alloys, or the effects of heat treatment on finished parts.
“In our tests we’ve seen wheel blades made from the same material but from different suppliers showing a huge range in operating life,” Timmer explained. “The difference is in the microstructure, which we can now see very quickly in our lab. It helps us understand why a specific part has performed well and build on that, but it also gives us a faster way of assessing new wear parts and suppliers.”
While the investment was intended primarily to drive continuous, fast innovation on wear parts for Wheelabrator machines, the facility is gaining popularity with customers who want a closer look at the parts they’re processing.
“The new metallography equipment is hugely beneficial in quality control and it has accelerated our R&D cycle dramatically,” Timmer said. “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 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.”