The PBI facility, as part of their planned maintenance period, worked on one of the two reactors late last year. During the cleaning process, high-pressure water damaged one of the bushings on one of the reactors. Two of these specially made GRAPHALLOY® bushings are used in each reactor, which makes the polymer used to produce the fibers at the plant.

Ritchey Metals, a Canonsburg, Pa.-based manufacturer of zinc alloys, entered into a joint venture with Imperial Group to serve the nonferrous alloyed metals industry in the southern half of the United States. Chicago-based Imperial Group, which consists of 17 industrial entities, is a diversified metals group moving nearly 75 million pounds of metal per month. The joint venture will utilize Imperial Group’s plant in Scottsboro, Ala., which will add capabilities to service the market stretching all from the East Coast to the Southwest. Ritchey Metals operates two facilities in southwestern Pennsylvania, each with multiple industrial furnaces.

Sanicro 35 is a super-austenitic alloy that bridges the performance gap between stainless steels and higher-cost nickel alloys.

Industrial Heating, during a Q&A session at FNA 2020, announced that it will support the Reshoring Initiative with a $2,500 sponsorship. The mission of the Reshoring Initiative is to bring good, well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the United States by assisting companies to more accurately assess their total cost of offshoring and to shift collective thinking from offshoring is cheaper to local reduces the total cost of ownership. As part of this new relationship, the Reshoring Initiative will provide Industrial Heating with editorial content throughout 2021.

Custom Electric Manufacturing (CEM), which was acquired by Sweden-based Kanthal in 2018, will go to market under the Kanthal brand effective Jan. 1, 2021. Headquartered in Wixom, Mich., CEM has been supplying original equipment and replacement heating elements for both electric and gas furnaces for more than 35 years. The background to the acquisition is that Kanthal plans to strengthen its footprint in the North American market.

Andritz Herr-Voss Stamco Inc., a member of international technology group Andritz, successfully commissioned a new cut-to-length line at Rolled Alloys’ facility in Fairfield, Ohio. The state-of-the-art line processes 0.125-inch x 48-inch stainless steel and nickel alloys and has an incoming coil capacity of 20,000 pounds.

It is a well-known fact that too many recordable safety incidents will result in the good people from OSHA showing up to hang around and ask a lot of questions. Nobody wants to get hurt on the job. Everyone at the facility has some other place to be once their shift is over, and many employees have family waiting for them. With that being said, why would people continue to operate poorly maintained manufacturing equipment and material-handling machinery? 

Over the past few decades, significant strides have been made to increase the life cycle of components that are to be used at high temperatures. Today, there are new alloys that can result in another doubling (or more) of the component life at far less the doubling of cost.

How much do you think you know about high-temperature corrosion, and what does “high temperature” really mean?

JFC GOLD is a liquid alkaline detergent that is ideal for cleaning and degreasing floors, equipment and machinery.