BEYOND SURFACES

Technology & Innovation This affects their functional service life and performance and increases spares requirements and fuel costs. Oerlikon Metco’s unique compu- tationally developed materials can help improve their service life by up to 300%. As a result of the pandemic, many mines experienced supply chain disrup- tions, including delivery of replacement GETs. This sparked a real interest in having the GETs last longer. The traditional solution is to hard-face GETs using tungsten carbide overlays. But: “The high costs of hard-faced GETs, the difficult logistics of sending them for hard-facing repairs, and the ‘one size fits all’ approach that does not consider particular environments on site reduce the cost to value metrics and make them often not economically viable for mine owners,” says Adolfo Castells, mining expert at Oerlikon Metco. Understanding our customers’ needs is of paramount importance in developing solutions designed to meet not only the application’s performance and technical demands, but also the value metrics for everyone in the supply chain. There- fore, Oerlikon Metco offers a different approach: a portfolio of hard-facing materials designed to protect GETs in different service environments. They can even be welded on-site with conventional welding equipment. “Our unique, patented Scoperta™ rapid alloy development allows us to formu- late completely new material compo- sitions, designed to solve very specific challenges. It uses a high throughput computational metallurgical process to evaluate millions of candidate alloy compositions, and potential candidates are then experimentally evaluated. This combined approach allows us to rapidly design compositions with much better in-service properties than conventional methodologies, and to develop new materials that meet and exceed per- formance and cost targets for mining’s most demanding applications,” says Adolfo Castells. Watch the recorded Webinar “New Solutions for High Impact and Abrasion for Ground Engaging Tools”, conducted by Adolfo Castells and Gerry Manning, Industry Segment Sales Manager Mining at Oerlikon Metco: bit.ly/get-solutions Their fascination is inescapable: mining machines seem made for giants. Neverthe- less, ground engaging tools (GETs) such as bucket teeth, cutting edge shrouds or track pad grousers are subject to constant impact, abrasion and gouging. Adolfo Castells is Global Product Portfolio Manager for industial markets at Oerlikon Metco and has been active in the Oil & Gas, Paper, Marine, Agricultural, Aero, IGT (Industrial Gas Turbines) and Mining industry for over 40 years. He’s an expert for new alloys for the mining sector and consults Oerlikon Metco’s customers globally. 24