G T E
Plansee: energy reduction in MIM
Plansee: Innovation drives energy reduction in vacuum furnaces for MIM and sinter-based Additive Manufacturing Whilst Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) and sinter-based Additive Manufacturing processes such as Binder Jetting (BJT) are already recognised as ‘greener’ technologies than conventional processes such as casting, the drive towards energy efficiency in the sintering process is crucial to further reduce the product carbon footprint of sintered parts. Here, Plansee High Performance Materials, a Plansee Group company, introduces a new generation of hot zones that reduce energy consumption by as much as 27% – while maintaining high performance.
Industry faces the challenge of saving energy on a massive scale. This is the only way to reduce longterm costs and the only way to produce goods in a climate-friendly process. However, this new efficiency must not come at the expense of quality. The resultant need for optimisations that combine high performance with sustainability becomes a complex task where industrial processes require a particularly large amount of energy. This is the case, for example, with the high-temperature vacuum furnaces used for the sintering processes in industries such as Metal Injection Moulding and sinter-based Additive Manufacturing, where working temperatures up to 1,750°C may be needed. Energy saving is a crucial factor in protecting the climate. In addition, the sintering industry has suffered from exceptionally high energy costs in recent years. “High-temperature vacuum furnaces for sintering and heat treatment typically consume several hundred kilowatts of power and process times can be as long as 24 hours,” stated Karl-Heinz Leitz,
VOL. 17 NO. 3
a development engineer at Plansee High Performance Materials in Reutte, Austria, who works on the numerical simulation of processes in refractory metal production and processing. “The energy consumption of a single sintering cycle run can easily exceed the annual power consumption of an average household.”
It therefore seems obvious that high-temperature furnaces in industry have a particularly large potential for saving energy. It is important to maximise this potential – not only to reduce energy costs, but also to protect the climate, and to help the global community achieve the goals set in the Paris Agreement,
Fig. 1 This vacuum sintering furnace, installed at Plansee Group, Reutte, features numerous energy-saving innovations (Courtesy Plansee SE)
© 2023 INOVAR COMMUNICATIONS LTD
AUTUMN 2023
PIM INTERNATIONAL
91
F D P
| contents | news | events | advertisers | website | newsletter |