StrikoWestofen Group — manufacturers of nonferrous melting systems for foundries and diecasters — reports it has a new order to supply three aluminum ingot melting systems to an unnamed, “large American automaker” casting cylinder blocks at a plant near Mexico City. The turnkey project will be executed by StrikoWestofen subsidiaries in Germany, Poland, and the U.S.
The group’s wholly owned U.S. subsidiary is StrikoDynarad Corp.
These systems starting up this spring are StrikoMelterfurnaces with integrated heat recovery, including all the peripheral equipment. Installation of the three furnaces began in December, according to the supplier. It is StrikoWestofen’s first project for the U.S. automaker.
StrikoMelterfurnaces are described as cost-competitive, with respect to capital investment, and offering significantly reduced operating costs. The furnaces’ shaft geometry and specially adapted burner technology makes it possible for the preheating, heating, and melting phases to be combined in a single melting shaft.
Together with the low temperature of the melting chamber, the StrikoMelter achieves metal yields up to 99.7%, thereby helping to reduce operating costs and casting costs per unit.
For cylinder block casting, the automaker chose a melting furnace of the StrikoMelterHS-N series. It will be manufactured in Michigan by StrikoDynarad and transported to its final location.
In the second casting line two stationary StrikoMelterMH II-N furnaces will be in operation.
"The decision in favor of StrikoWestofen represents a technological paradigm shift,” according to group manager Rudi Riedel, “away from energy- and resource-intensive reverb furnace technology (and) toward our state-of-the-art ‘EtaMax’ shaft furnace technology with integrated heat recuperation.
“A further benefit is that, due to our presence in Michigan, we are ideally placed to react to the demands of the local markets with our know-how and production capacity,” Riedel continued.
"Our customer not only has faith in the quality and performance of our products but also relies to a high degree on our planning and installation expertise," he said. "During the bidding process we succeeded in almost halving the costs of the fullyequipped melting line by completely restructuring the original line layout. The same applies to the space requirements on the production line. Our systems need only half the installation footprint against traditional technologies, which means further cost savings for the customer. In this context we benefitted greatly from the technical know-how of our U.S. company, StrikoDynarad Corp."