Kennesaw, GA (October 4, 2006) – After significant testing at Consolidated Engineering Company’s in-house Research & Development facility, and further testing in a working foundry, CEC has completed comprehensive field trials of the CleanCast® Heat Treatment System. Utilizing a mobile, compact test unit, designed to prove the value of CleanCast® in potential customer foundries, CEC set up a field test environment at a foundry of one of the world’s leading producers of automotive castings. 

One of the theories that CEC attempted to prove definitively is that castings obtain higher properties and shorter cycle times when loaded into the furnace at higher temperatures.  This Process Critical Temperature/Time relationship, a principle that CEC has patented, involves taking hot castings directly after pouring and placing them into the CleanCast® furnace before they have a chance to cool. This method also utilizes the heat from the molten metal of the casting to create a process where less energy and time are required to heat the casting and achieve optimal properties.  After extensive testing, this principle was in fact validated in the working foundry setting.

Also proven was that the use of high pressure, high impact hot air nozzles in the test equipment promoted rapid de-coring of complex cast parts in addition to rapid heat up.  Additional benefits that would also be gained from such cell type processing would be less labor and manual handling, lower inventories, smaller equipment footprint and reduced environmental effects.

“This is the first of many tests that we hope to conduct in working foundries,” said Paul M. Crafton, President of CEC. “We built this mobile test equipment to show potential customers, in their own foundries, that our equipment is superior to the traditional heat treatment options on the market today.”