- Email: [email protected]
Sandvik Osprey: a very bright future
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
SPECIAL FEATURE
metal-powder.net
Sandvik Osprey: a very bright future Joseph Capus Founded in the 1970s to develop and license spray-forming technology, and later acquired by Sandvik AB of Sweden, Sandvik Osprey Ltd has become a major supplier of fine gas-atomized powders to the MIM industry. With continuing rapid growth, the company has branched out into manufacture of related high-tech products. Consulting editor Joseph Capus reports on a visit to the company’s facilities in Neath, South Wales. Of the thousands who travel each day on the train-line from London Paddington to South Wales, very few if any would realize the significance of the pale blue buildings bearing the name of a mysterious bird, visible from the tracks just before the train pulls into Neath station. The home of Sandvik Osprey Ltd in Milland Road houses a very busy operation engaged in the production of advanced materials and products that go into a vast array of applications. These applications range from consumer products like computers, mobile phones and car radiators, to defense, aerospace, and even a highly scientific project to explore the origin of the universe.
History Founded by three post-grads from Swansea University more than 40 years ago, the company has become an outstanding success story in the fields of powder metallurgy and advanced materials. After filing a patent on a process to produce metal pre-forms by atomizing and spray-deposition, the company was set up in 1974 as Osprey Metals Ltd to develop and license the process (actually named after the sea-hawk, whose image forms part of the company logo). The first license was sold to Sandvik AB, of Sandviken, Sweden to make spray-deposited pre-forms for tube production. Sandvik later acquired 51% ownership of Osprey Metals (in 1979) and eventually 100% in 1984. The company name was later changed to Sandvik Osprey Ltd. The company’s gas atomization technology was also applied to the production of specialty metal and alloy powders with the technology for both spray-forming and metal powder atomization being licensed in previous years. A E-mail address: [email protected].
Powder Group was established in the 1990s to manufacture and market very fine gas atomized powders, principally for metal injection molding (MIM). The first inert gas atomization plant using Osprey’s unique fine powder technology was started up in1995. Today, Sandvik Osprey is not only a major supplier to the global MIM industry but has branched out into related technologies such as the production of spray-formed controlled-expansion alloy components for electronics packaging and other advanced hightech applications. In July this year the opportunity was taken to visit Sandvik Osprey’s factory in Neath, South Wales, and sit down with Richard Park, Managing Director (Fig. 1) and some of his senior managers, to get an update on the company’s progress and learn something about its future prospects.
Fine gas atomized powders The meeting began with a comprehensive presentation on health and safety matters given by Richard Park, who said that the emphasis on safety at Sandvik came right from the top, in the person of Petra Einarsson, President of the Sandvik Materials Technology Division. Powder Group Director, Martin Kearns, reviewed progress in the fine powders business, indicating that sales growth had been very strong, averaging in double digits for each of the past ten years, with one blip from the 2009 global financial crisis when sales were flat for that year. Powder sales now represented three-quarters of Sandvik Osprey’s annual turnover and were expected to continue growing strongly at about 15% p.a. In 2010, the company won the Queen’s Award for Industry in recognition of Export Excellence. Sandvik Osprey’s powder products have been consumed chiefly in
0026-0657/ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2015.10.003
81
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
SPECIAL FEATURE FIGURE 1
Sandvik Osprey Managing Director, Richard Park, with senior managers at the company’s factory in Neath, South Wales (left to right: Keith Murray, Andrew Coleman, Richard Park, and Martin Kearns) (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
MIM part manufacture, and are now also increasingly being used in additive manufacturing/3-D printing. The spherical particle shape of gas-atomized powders gives advantages in MIM production and also in emerging applications like 3-D printing. Other applications include spray coatings, E-M shielding, and filters. As expected, the majority of materials are ferrous-based: stainless steels such as AISI 316L, 17-4PH, as well low-alloy steels and master alloys (i.e. ‘concentrates’ of the final alloy) that are employed in MIM production. But the company has also developed a huge portfolio of specialty alloys customized for specific clients, such as nickel- and cobalt-based superalloys, as well as materials for medical and dental applications, MCrAlY powders for plasma and thermal spray, among others. Sandvik Osprey’s fine powders for MIM are sold to MIM feedstock manufacturers and also direct to MIM houses that make their own feedstock. On the production side, Sandvik Osprey has gradually increased capacity over the years by adding more atomizing units. The inert gas atomizing plants can use either nitrogen or argon as required. Quality certifications are very important to the company, as are environmental and health and safety certifications, the latter (OHSAS 18001) ‘being the core to many of Sandvik Osprey’s values’, according to Kearns. An important milestone was the installation in 2012 of the then largest atomizing unit, which increased capacity by about 30%, and that plant is now the model for a new multi-million-dollar expansion that was approved in June 2015. This new investment (over $5 million) will increase atomizing capacity again by about 30%, and is expected to come on line in Q3 2016. With these expansions has come major growth in staffing: from about 70 employees in 2010 to over 140 today. These increases have not only been in powder production but also in spray-forming activities (see below). Currently, Sandvik Osprey has six inert-gas atomization units (Fig. 2). These vary in melting capacity allowing production from 20 kg customized experimental batches on up to 3000 kg 82
FIGURE 2
Gas-Atomizing plant at Sandvik Osprey (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
production lots to be shipped to customers worldwide. The total plant capacity is currently over 3000 tonnes/year. Raw materials include primary scrap, ferro-alloys, as well as virgin materials and re-melting of bought-in vacuum-melted ingot material – for customers requiring very low oxygen, nitrogen and residual element levels – ultimately driven by customers’ specifications. The majority of production is in high-yield fine powders, with particle size typically averaging less than 50 mm, which is where the company’s proprietary technology comes into play. In the scale-up all the way from an experimental batch, the powder characteristics remain the same. This is a flexibility that most other powder producers with one large plant do not have. Also, the possibility of using either nitrogen or argon as the atomizing medium extends the range of feasible alloys quite significantly. This flexibility in the product development cycle and product range is a feature that brings praise in customer satisfaction surveys that are conducted regularly. Sandvik Osprey also has state-of-the-art downstream processing equipment (Fig. 3), including eleven industrial-scale sieves and nine industrial-scale classifiers, some small-scale and also a number of very large capacity units – more than enough sizing capacity to match the atomizing production. While fine powders (Fig. 4) are the mainstream products for the company’s business, the sales of what they call conventional powders ( 150 mm particle size) continue to rise. Some vacuum packaging is also conducted on a small scale, for example, for pure copper powder.
Spray-formed products Although Osprey Metals came into existence to develop and license the spray-forming process (the Osprey process), licensing has long since ceased to contribute to the company’s revenue. Some of the patents, however, are still ‘live’. Towards the end of the 1990s, Sandvik Osprey worked on an EUsponsored R&D project to develop a family of alloys that are today called ‘Controlled Expansion Alloys or CE Alloys’. These are spray-formed binary silicon–aluminum alloys that cannot be cast in the conventional way because of massive segregation, very coarse microstructure and inferior properties. Spray-forming was a
FIGURE 3
Banks of sizing equipment (sieves and classifiers) (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
SPECIAL FEATURE
solution to these problems on account of its rapid solidification characteristic. As Richard Park pointed out, spray-forming is a relatively costly process so you would only use it to overcome difficulties such as macro-segregation that cannot be readily resolved by other means. Sandvik Osprey has developed a family of Si–Al products with varying ratios of those two elements in order to control the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), which can range between 5 and 17 mm/m/8C (Fig. 5). This is a key selling point of these CE Alloy products that are principally employed by customers for use in conjunction with electronics products, to which they are frequently bonded, as in carriers and hermetically-sealed packages. These are often communications devices that get turned on and off at high frequency, so they heat up and cool down and if the coefficients of thermal expansion do not match, failure can eventually result. Sandvik Osprey can ‘dial in’ the CTE to match the customers requirements. In addition to electronic packages there are structural applications requiring very light, stiff materials, for example, in highspeed manufacturing in the electronics industry. Target industries include defense, aerospace, telecoms, semi-conductor manufacturing – generally in sectors where very high precision and light weight are required. Sandvik Osprey does not sell CE-Alloys as ‘materials’, but as machined and often nickel- and gold-plated products (Fig. 6). One of the reasons is that CE alloys are difficult to machine – requiring expert knowledge. Products are always made to customers’ prints, and almost always working under trade-secrecy agreements, collaborative arrangements, and occasionally, export control. Sandvik Osprey has looked at other light weight/high strength alloys such as aluminum–lithium and aluminum–zinc, but so far silicon– aluminum has kept them too busy, as well as another new sprayformed material they call Trillium (see below). The customer base for CE Alloys was said to be currently about 1000, some taking up to a thousand parts per year, even as high as 10,000, or as low as just one. Individual products vary in size from less than one millimeter to over one meter, some very simple in form, some very complex shapes. Commenting on the growth prospects, Park said ‘. . .CE Alloys [business] is growing at 25 to 30% a year, and actually if you were to look at ultimate market sizes, because of the
FIGURE 4
SEM images of Sandvik Osprey fine gas-atomized powder particles: top: 32 mm stainless steel MIM powder; bottom: 53 mm top cut stainless steel powder for additive manufacturing (Photos courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
FIGURE 5
Chart of CTE versus silicon content for Si–Al alloy (Courtesy Sandvik Osprey). 83
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
next phase of this project could see production stepping up to 3000 tonnes/year, which would have to be on a new site. Park saw this as another big opportunity.
Future opportunities
SPECIAL FEATURE FIGURE 6
Finished (gold-plated) CE Alloy electronic package (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
very broad diversity of the CE Alloy applications, the markets available to [Sandvik Osprey] are probably much greater than for fine [metal] powder’.
Trillium Many years ago, Sandvik Osprey developed a technique for injecting particulates into the spray-forming stream, for example to inject metallic powder into the stream. In its most basic form, quite useful to increase the material yield, the technique could also be used to inject non-metallic particles such as silicon carbide, titanium boride or similar materials to improve wear resistance of the spray-formed product. Some eight or nine years ago, the company started working on a project in an exclusive cooperation with what is now Gra¨nges of Sweden, the largest producer of clad aluminum strip used in the manufacture of automotive heat exchangers. Each motor vehicle today has several heat exchangers: radiator, air-conditioning evaporator, oil cooler, turbo-charger intercooler, among others, all made by brazing of formed aluminum. The tonnage of clad aluminum strip consumed in the manufacture of heat exchangers is huge, up to 500,000 tonnes per annum, about 10% of which is the cladding material. Sandvik Osprey has developed a product which it has called Trillium, in which flux salt particles are injected into the aluminum alloy during spray-forming of a billet that is subsequently rolled into strip to form the cladding. When this strip material is used in heat-exchanger manufacture, brazing is greatly assisted by the release of the flux from within during the brazing process. One of the key selling attributes is that Sandvik Osprey’s product enables the production of smaller, lighter exchanger design – a very important aspect for automotive manufacturers. International patents are currently being pursued for this spray-formed product and Sandvik Osprey already has production capacity of many hundreds of tonnes per year, depending on billet size. There are other related products that are not part of the agreement with Gra¨nges, and Sandvik Osprey is preparing to bring these to the market. The 84
As part of the Sandvik AB global corporation, Sandvik Osprey is encouraged to look for new opportunities and the parent company is there for support. MIDAS, a parent company R&D vacuum melting gas atomization metal powder production facility in Sweden, with a main focus on HIP powders, has become increasingly involved in materials for additive manufacturing, especially nickel-base alloys. MIDAS is able to deliver very low oxygen and nitrogen powders that are suitable for the energy sector, providing very high mechanical properties, not only for HIPing, but also for additive manufacturing. This facility can make powders ranging in particle size from 45 mm to 500 mm and is in process of being expanded towards a pilot-scale production plant, probably in the coming year. This will be quite distinct from Sandvik Osprey’s technology – more similar to conventional coarse powder atomizing. Sandvik Osprey currently has no vacuum melting capacity but can employ re-melting of vacuum-melted feedstock. With inert atmosphere shrouding this has been found to give results in terms of cleanliness and oxygen level almost equal to that of vacuumprocessed powder. However, Park added, Sandvik Osprey will probably get into vacuum-melted powder production at some time in the future. Sandvik AB has also made investments aimed at additive manufacturing (AM), including an R&D team at Sandviken, working on other powder producers’ products as well as on Sandvik Osprey’s powders. This group is trying to develop unique types of alloys and products for AM. Initially these would be for Sandvik’s own internal use. Sandvik already has 3 or 4 types of additive manufacturing machine in place. Martin Kearns commented on prospects for titanium powders, saying that they had been working with a few select customers who were thought to have genuine potential in that direction. They could be in a position to take this further in a year or so. It would not be a ‘me-too’ product for the titanium powder market but would make use of Sandvik Osprey’s advanced atomizing technology to produce high yields of fine titanium powder. Andrew Coleman, Sales Manager for CE Alloys, referred to a highly scientific project they were cooperating on. This involved the production of spray-formed components for the CLASS (Cosmology Large-Angular Scale Surveyor) astrophysics research telescope being built by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. When completed this telescope and three others like it will be used to study the Big-Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Sandvik Osprey is providing a sprayformed CE Alloy material component to support the fragile silicon detector that will measure the cosmic microwave background. To reduce unwanted interference, this will be housed in a cryostat unit that will cool the system to a temperature below one-tenth of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero – a very small but highly-interesting application of a spray-formed controlledexpansion alloy. Sandvik Osprey’s in-house research, on the other hand, was largely devoted to short-term objectives such as process studies and assisting customers in how best to use Sandvik Osprey
powders. Keith Murray emphasized that customer satisfaction was still at the top of the company’s commercial drive and formal customer surveys had been part of quality management for several years. Results showed customers liked Sandvik Osprey’s product
SPECIAL FEATURE
quality and consistency from batch to batch, as well as the vast product range. Building on its past and current successes Sandvik Osprey looks like its going to enjoy very bright prospects well into the future.
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
85
SPECIAL FEATURE
metal-powder.net
Sandvik Osprey: a very bright future Joseph Capus Founded in the 1970s to develop and license spray-forming technology, and later acquired by Sandvik AB of Sweden, Sandvik Osprey Ltd has become a major supplier of fine gas-atomized powders to the MIM industry. With continuing rapid growth, the company has branched out into manufacture of related high-tech products. Consulting editor Joseph Capus reports on a visit to the company’s facilities in Neath, South Wales. Of the thousands who travel each day on the train-line from London Paddington to South Wales, very few if any would realize the significance of the pale blue buildings bearing the name of a mysterious bird, visible from the tracks just before the train pulls into Neath station. The home of Sandvik Osprey Ltd in Milland Road houses a very busy operation engaged in the production of advanced materials and products that go into a vast array of applications. These applications range from consumer products like computers, mobile phones and car radiators, to defense, aerospace, and even a highly scientific project to explore the origin of the universe.
History Founded by three post-grads from Swansea University more than 40 years ago, the company has become an outstanding success story in the fields of powder metallurgy and advanced materials. After filing a patent on a process to produce metal pre-forms by atomizing and spray-deposition, the company was set up in 1974 as Osprey Metals Ltd to develop and license the process (actually named after the sea-hawk, whose image forms part of the company logo). The first license was sold to Sandvik AB, of Sandviken, Sweden to make spray-deposited pre-forms for tube production. Sandvik later acquired 51% ownership of Osprey Metals (in 1979) and eventually 100% in 1984. The company name was later changed to Sandvik Osprey Ltd. The company’s gas atomization technology was also applied to the production of specialty metal and alloy powders with the technology for both spray-forming and metal powder atomization being licensed in previous years. A E-mail address: [email protected].
Powder Group was established in the 1990s to manufacture and market very fine gas atomized powders, principally for metal injection molding (MIM). The first inert gas atomization plant using Osprey’s unique fine powder technology was started up in1995. Today, Sandvik Osprey is not only a major supplier to the global MIM industry but has branched out into related technologies such as the production of spray-formed controlled-expansion alloy components for electronics packaging and other advanced hightech applications. In July this year the opportunity was taken to visit Sandvik Osprey’s factory in Neath, South Wales, and sit down with Richard Park, Managing Director (Fig. 1) and some of his senior managers, to get an update on the company’s progress and learn something about its future prospects.
Fine gas atomized powders The meeting began with a comprehensive presentation on health and safety matters given by Richard Park, who said that the emphasis on safety at Sandvik came right from the top, in the person of Petra Einarsson, President of the Sandvik Materials Technology Division. Powder Group Director, Martin Kearns, reviewed progress in the fine powders business, indicating that sales growth had been very strong, averaging in double digits for each of the past ten years, with one blip from the 2009 global financial crisis when sales were flat for that year. Powder sales now represented three-quarters of Sandvik Osprey’s annual turnover and were expected to continue growing strongly at about 15% p.a. In 2010, the company won the Queen’s Award for Industry in recognition of Export Excellence. Sandvik Osprey’s powder products have been consumed chiefly in
0026-0657/ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2015.10.003
81
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
SPECIAL FEATURE FIGURE 1
Sandvik Osprey Managing Director, Richard Park, with senior managers at the company’s factory in Neath, South Wales (left to right: Keith Murray, Andrew Coleman, Richard Park, and Martin Kearns) (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
MIM part manufacture, and are now also increasingly being used in additive manufacturing/3-D printing. The spherical particle shape of gas-atomized powders gives advantages in MIM production and also in emerging applications like 3-D printing. Other applications include spray coatings, E-M shielding, and filters. As expected, the majority of materials are ferrous-based: stainless steels such as AISI 316L, 17-4PH, as well low-alloy steels and master alloys (i.e. ‘concentrates’ of the final alloy) that are employed in MIM production. But the company has also developed a huge portfolio of specialty alloys customized for specific clients, such as nickel- and cobalt-based superalloys, as well as materials for medical and dental applications, MCrAlY powders for plasma and thermal spray, among others. Sandvik Osprey’s fine powders for MIM are sold to MIM feedstock manufacturers and also direct to MIM houses that make their own feedstock. On the production side, Sandvik Osprey has gradually increased capacity over the years by adding more atomizing units. The inert gas atomizing plants can use either nitrogen or argon as required. Quality certifications are very important to the company, as are environmental and health and safety certifications, the latter (OHSAS 18001) ‘being the core to many of Sandvik Osprey’s values’, according to Kearns. An important milestone was the installation in 2012 of the then largest atomizing unit, which increased capacity by about 30%, and that plant is now the model for a new multi-million-dollar expansion that was approved in June 2015. This new investment (over $5 million) will increase atomizing capacity again by about 30%, and is expected to come on line in Q3 2016. With these expansions has come major growth in staffing: from about 70 employees in 2010 to over 140 today. These increases have not only been in powder production but also in spray-forming activities (see below). Currently, Sandvik Osprey has six inert-gas atomization units (Fig. 2). These vary in melting capacity allowing production from 20 kg customized experimental batches on up to 3000 kg 82
FIGURE 2
Gas-Atomizing plant at Sandvik Osprey (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
production lots to be shipped to customers worldwide. The total plant capacity is currently over 3000 tonnes/year. Raw materials include primary scrap, ferro-alloys, as well as virgin materials and re-melting of bought-in vacuum-melted ingot material – for customers requiring very low oxygen, nitrogen and residual element levels – ultimately driven by customers’ specifications. The majority of production is in high-yield fine powders, with particle size typically averaging less than 50 mm, which is where the company’s proprietary technology comes into play. In the scale-up all the way from an experimental batch, the powder characteristics remain the same. This is a flexibility that most other powder producers with one large plant do not have. Also, the possibility of using either nitrogen or argon as the atomizing medium extends the range of feasible alloys quite significantly. This flexibility in the product development cycle and product range is a feature that brings praise in customer satisfaction surveys that are conducted regularly. Sandvik Osprey also has state-of-the-art downstream processing equipment (Fig. 3), including eleven industrial-scale sieves and nine industrial-scale classifiers, some small-scale and also a number of very large capacity units – more than enough sizing capacity to match the atomizing production. While fine powders (Fig. 4) are the mainstream products for the company’s business, the sales of what they call conventional powders ( 150 mm particle size) continue to rise. Some vacuum packaging is also conducted on a small scale, for example, for pure copper powder.
Spray-formed products Although Osprey Metals came into existence to develop and license the spray-forming process (the Osprey process), licensing has long since ceased to contribute to the company’s revenue. Some of the patents, however, are still ‘live’. Towards the end of the 1990s, Sandvik Osprey worked on an EUsponsored R&D project to develop a family of alloys that are today called ‘Controlled Expansion Alloys or CE Alloys’. These are spray-formed binary silicon–aluminum alloys that cannot be cast in the conventional way because of massive segregation, very coarse microstructure and inferior properties. Spray-forming was a
FIGURE 3
Banks of sizing equipment (sieves and classifiers) (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
SPECIAL FEATURE
solution to these problems on account of its rapid solidification characteristic. As Richard Park pointed out, spray-forming is a relatively costly process so you would only use it to overcome difficulties such as macro-segregation that cannot be readily resolved by other means. Sandvik Osprey has developed a family of Si–Al products with varying ratios of those two elements in order to control the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), which can range between 5 and 17 mm/m/8C (Fig. 5). This is a key selling point of these CE Alloy products that are principally employed by customers for use in conjunction with electronics products, to which they are frequently bonded, as in carriers and hermetically-sealed packages. These are often communications devices that get turned on and off at high frequency, so they heat up and cool down and if the coefficients of thermal expansion do not match, failure can eventually result. Sandvik Osprey can ‘dial in’ the CTE to match the customers requirements. In addition to electronic packages there are structural applications requiring very light, stiff materials, for example, in highspeed manufacturing in the electronics industry. Target industries include defense, aerospace, telecoms, semi-conductor manufacturing – generally in sectors where very high precision and light weight are required. Sandvik Osprey does not sell CE-Alloys as ‘materials’, but as machined and often nickel- and gold-plated products (Fig. 6). One of the reasons is that CE alloys are difficult to machine – requiring expert knowledge. Products are always made to customers’ prints, and almost always working under trade-secrecy agreements, collaborative arrangements, and occasionally, export control. Sandvik Osprey has looked at other light weight/high strength alloys such as aluminum–lithium and aluminum–zinc, but so far silicon– aluminum has kept them too busy, as well as another new sprayformed material they call Trillium (see below). The customer base for CE Alloys was said to be currently about 1000, some taking up to a thousand parts per year, even as high as 10,000, or as low as just one. Individual products vary in size from less than one millimeter to over one meter, some very simple in form, some very complex shapes. Commenting on the growth prospects, Park said ‘. . .CE Alloys [business] is growing at 25 to 30% a year, and actually if you were to look at ultimate market sizes, because of the
FIGURE 4
SEM images of Sandvik Osprey fine gas-atomized powder particles: top: 32 mm stainless steel MIM powder; bottom: 53 mm top cut stainless steel powder for additive manufacturing (Photos courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
FIGURE 5
Chart of CTE versus silicon content for Si–Al alloy (Courtesy Sandvik Osprey). 83
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
next phase of this project could see production stepping up to 3000 tonnes/year, which would have to be on a new site. Park saw this as another big opportunity.
Future opportunities
SPECIAL FEATURE FIGURE 6
Finished (gold-plated) CE Alloy electronic package (Photo courtesy Sandvik Osprey).
very broad diversity of the CE Alloy applications, the markets available to [Sandvik Osprey] are probably much greater than for fine [metal] powder’.
Trillium Many years ago, Sandvik Osprey developed a technique for injecting particulates into the spray-forming stream, for example to inject metallic powder into the stream. In its most basic form, quite useful to increase the material yield, the technique could also be used to inject non-metallic particles such as silicon carbide, titanium boride or similar materials to improve wear resistance of the spray-formed product. Some eight or nine years ago, the company started working on a project in an exclusive cooperation with what is now Gra¨nges of Sweden, the largest producer of clad aluminum strip used in the manufacture of automotive heat exchangers. Each motor vehicle today has several heat exchangers: radiator, air-conditioning evaporator, oil cooler, turbo-charger intercooler, among others, all made by brazing of formed aluminum. The tonnage of clad aluminum strip consumed in the manufacture of heat exchangers is huge, up to 500,000 tonnes per annum, about 10% of which is the cladding material. Sandvik Osprey has developed a product which it has called Trillium, in which flux salt particles are injected into the aluminum alloy during spray-forming of a billet that is subsequently rolled into strip to form the cladding. When this strip material is used in heat-exchanger manufacture, brazing is greatly assisted by the release of the flux from within during the brazing process. One of the key selling attributes is that Sandvik Osprey’s product enables the production of smaller, lighter exchanger design – a very important aspect for automotive manufacturers. International patents are currently being pursued for this spray-formed product and Sandvik Osprey already has production capacity of many hundreds of tonnes per year, depending on billet size. There are other related products that are not part of the agreement with Gra¨nges, and Sandvik Osprey is preparing to bring these to the market. The 84
As part of the Sandvik AB global corporation, Sandvik Osprey is encouraged to look for new opportunities and the parent company is there for support. MIDAS, a parent company R&D vacuum melting gas atomization metal powder production facility in Sweden, with a main focus on HIP powders, has become increasingly involved in materials for additive manufacturing, especially nickel-base alloys. MIDAS is able to deliver very low oxygen and nitrogen powders that are suitable for the energy sector, providing very high mechanical properties, not only for HIPing, but also for additive manufacturing. This facility can make powders ranging in particle size from 45 mm to 500 mm and is in process of being expanded towards a pilot-scale production plant, probably in the coming year. This will be quite distinct from Sandvik Osprey’s technology – more similar to conventional coarse powder atomizing. Sandvik Osprey currently has no vacuum melting capacity but can employ re-melting of vacuum-melted feedstock. With inert atmosphere shrouding this has been found to give results in terms of cleanliness and oxygen level almost equal to that of vacuumprocessed powder. However, Park added, Sandvik Osprey will probably get into vacuum-melted powder production at some time in the future. Sandvik AB has also made investments aimed at additive manufacturing (AM), including an R&D team at Sandviken, working on other powder producers’ products as well as on Sandvik Osprey’s powders. This group is trying to develop unique types of alloys and products for AM. Initially these would be for Sandvik’s own internal use. Sandvik already has 3 or 4 types of additive manufacturing machine in place. Martin Kearns commented on prospects for titanium powders, saying that they had been working with a few select customers who were thought to have genuine potential in that direction. They could be in a position to take this further in a year or so. It would not be a ‘me-too’ product for the titanium powder market but would make use of Sandvik Osprey’s advanced atomizing technology to produce high yields of fine titanium powder. Andrew Coleman, Sales Manager for CE Alloys, referred to a highly scientific project they were cooperating on. This involved the production of spray-formed components for the CLASS (Cosmology Large-Angular Scale Surveyor) astrophysics research telescope being built by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. When completed this telescope and three others like it will be used to study the Big-Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Sandvik Osprey is providing a sprayformed CE Alloy material component to support the fragile silicon detector that will measure the cosmic microwave background. To reduce unwanted interference, this will be housed in a cryostat unit that will cool the system to a temperature below one-tenth of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero – a very small but highly-interesting application of a spray-formed controlledexpansion alloy. Sandvik Osprey’s in-house research, on the other hand, was largely devoted to short-term objectives such as process studies and assisting customers in how best to use Sandvik Osprey
powders. Keith Murray emphasized that customer satisfaction was still at the top of the company’s commercial drive and formal customer surveys had been part of quality management for several years. Results showed customers liked Sandvik Osprey’s product
SPECIAL FEATURE
quality and consistency from batch to batch, as well as the vast product range. Building on its past and current successes Sandvik Osprey looks like its going to enjoy very bright prospects well into the future.
SPECIAL FEATURE
Metal Powder Report Volume 71, Number 2 March/April 2016
85