Wheel blast wear parts are a key focus of the center’s R&D activity. They present the fastest route to lowering the running costs of customers’ wheel blast processes. Over the last few years, Wheelabrator has strengthened the technology center and its testing capabilities specifically to do this.
In order to deliver significant gains through wear parts, the testing team needs ever deeper insights into wear behaviour. Insights only metallography can provide at speed.
Christian Timmer, Wheelabrator’s global head of testing, explains: “The wear tests commonly done in the industry are complete black boxes. 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.”
It’s all in the microstructure
The new equipment, which includes cutting, grinding and polishing tools as well as a state-of-the-start digital microscope allows the team to analyze the microstructure of metallic parts and see the effect of heat treatment and variations in the chemical make-up of the material.
Christian continues: “In our tests we’ve seen wheel blades made from the same material but from different suppliers showing a huge range in operating life. How can that be? 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.”
Faster innovation, beyond wear parts
While the €80,000 investment in the lab was intended primarily to drive continuous, fast innovation on wear parts for Wheelabrator machines, the facility is already proving popular with customers who want to take a very close look at the parts they’re processing.
Christian concludes: “The new metallography equipment is hugely beneficial in quality control and it has accelerated our R&D cycle dramatically. 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 in 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.”
Thanks to the extra laboratory capabilities, Wheelabrator will now be able to release new wear part innovations for its blast wheels at an even faster pace.
