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By
William Nemedi
President, Inter-Source Recovery Systems, Inc.
The
major reason to not puck machining waste is cost. Secondary smelters–the
customers for your tons of machining waste–pay a premium for clean,
consistently sized, dry chips. Their preference for them is so strong
that many have even financed our chip management systems in plants,
in exchange for the yield. |
Please note
that pucking and briquetting are different processes, resulting
in two different products. (See side bar.) This is a
discussion of pucking, a sometimes proposed but inequal alternative
to automatic chip processing.
Pucking cannot
deliver the three essentials for you to receive top dollar.
Clean: Pucks
are manufactured by compressing metal, including tramp contaminates.
A smelter receiving
pucks has no option for separating these compactions of
impure alloys, as they do with chips. Compromised purity means
you
are paid less. Consistently
sized: Smelting remelts metal, yielding the recovered
alloy, along with undesirable moisture,
oxidization and dross. Smelters prefer chips over impure
pucks because their melting offers two advantages:
Energy
savings: Remelt is
more easily accomplished with consistently sized
chips, not large chunks of varying content and density
(compression
causes a dense puck exterior, surrounding a less-dense
core.) |
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Minimized
oxidation and dross: The majority of secondary smelters
use reverb-type furnaces. As these are not designed
for optimal puck remelt, pucks tend to hover near the
surface of molten metal, forfeiting their full recovery to
oxidation
and dross.
Dry: Pucking
attempts to form a solid, but fluids are trapped within
the voids and pockets. This has
with serious consequences of:
Environmental
liability: Storage, handling and transport of less-than-dry
pucks results
in regulatory, ISO 14000 and environmental liability.
Recovery
loss and liability: When submerged in molten metal, pucks
with encapsulated moisture can explode, splattering the
metal. One smelter likened it to tossing grenades into
the melt. This reduces recovery, and introduces liability
issues to the “manufacturer” of the puck – you.
Pucking
can’t deliver what your customer for machining
waste desires – clean, consistently sized, dry
chips. However, there are additional reasons for automated
chip processing’s superiority over pucking, like
efficient payload, noise abatement, maintenance costs,
and integration with other components for proper chip
management. Due to space limitations, they aren’t
covered here. Contact us for a copy of our complimentary
white paper explaining these issues.
In summary,
you have two options to handle machining waste:
- Remanufacture
it into another product (pucks), compromising its value,
or
- Manage it,
via automated chip processing for maximum payback.
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