What is it: Pioneering grain refiner testing system
Why Opticast?: To establish efficiency of grain refiners
What are the benefits? Improve efficiency and make cost savings
Opticast enables casthouses to determine the precise amount of grain refiner they need to achieve optimum refinement, no more guesswork. Opticast, which can be operated by casthouse personnel, has now been introduced in over 20 casthouses.
Casthouses can establish the consistency of the efficiency of the grain refiner they use to reduce surface blemishes, cracking and defects using Opticast at their own plants or at our technology test centre at BCAST at Brunel University London.
Traditionally, this has been a guessing game for casthouses and struggling to maintain the same grain size in the melt every time has had wide-ranging repercussions, including scrapped charges, product downgrades and higher processing costs.
As the only testing system in the industry, it is helping casthouses worldwide meet demand for higher internal and surface quality in slabs and billets from ever more discerning manufacturers.
OPTIMISING GRAIN REFINEMENT
The Opticast System is a unique technology and methodology for the in-line control and optimisation of grain refinement.
In conjunction with Optifine it has been successfully adopted into routine production at many aluminium plants worldwide where it is reducing costs and increasing quality.
Instrumentation used in the Opticast system
In the Opticast system calibration is an important step to determine how a specific alloy responds to addition of fresh nuclei via the grain refining rod. This involves establishing the equations for grain refinement curves of Optifine and commercial TiBAl grain refiners and generating data such as in the graph shown for an AA 6060 alloy.
Grain refinement in an AA 6060 alloy illustrating the much lower amount of Optifine than the amount of commercial grain refiners needed to obtain a 245 µm grain size.
To view / download our Opticast Product Information Sheet you need to Register or Login first.
Please note: we manually review registrations so please allow us 1 business day to approve your account, thank you.
To view / download our Optifine Product Information Sheet you need to Register or Login first.
Please note: we manually review registrations so please allow us 1 business day to approve your account, thank you.