There’s a competitive advantage in melting chips in-house instead of sending them to a secondary smelter. Savings may be derived from:
- Eliminating transport costs
- Minimizing handling costs
- Paying to melt the metal only once—when ready for use—instead of at the secondary smelter, and then again upon return
- Reducing environmental liability—you know how chips are stored and handled
In-house conversion also provides you with control of the valued commodity of chips—you know what you have and where it is.
However, safety is a primary pucking concern, which led Inter-Source to engineer the dry pucker.
Equipment
Dry pucking solves a variety of concerns, with the primary one being safety. The majority of furnaces used for in-house conversion are best suited to remelting solids. Remelting anything else, like chips, leads to excess metal loss. In a failed and unsafe effort to eliminate the loss, some manufacturers first manufacture a “near solid,” by pucking less-than-dry chips. The hazard lies with the explosion potential of the inherently trapped moisture.
Other complications from melting moisture-containing pucks include:
- Inefficiency – due to the need to burn-off fluids
- Increased environmental responsibility from combustion of fluids, and additional emissions to monitor, capture and process
- Housekeeping from handling leaky pucks
Video Overview
Examples
Before and After
