Casting plants for Aluminum

• Excellent metallurgical properties of cast product
• Completely free of cracks and shrink holes
• No surface oxides
• Uniform shrinkage during solidification
• Consistent geometry of product for easy stacking and bundling

• High safety level through automation
• Low labor and maintenance costs

Hertwich offers VDC billet casting machines based on proprietary design. To date several casters have been commissioned for both - billets for extrusion and forging as well as rolling slabs. The Hertwich VDC casters are compatible with all major brands of casting tooling.

The fully continuous HDC process is ideal for automation. Sawing, weighing, hard stamping, ink marking, labelling, stacking and strapping is carried out without any additional manpower. During past years the plants have been improved consistently and now feature automatic cast starts and stops as well as automatic tundish adjustment.

Hertwich R&D has taken on the challenge of designing a much improved caster. The new design meets longtime existing customer demands and comes with some clear advantages such as an easier to control melt supply and pouring system as well as water-free cooling during the metal solidification phase.

Hertwich Inline melt treatment equipment consists of

• casting launder systems of various cross sections
• box type degassers of various sizes with up to 4 rotors
• grain refining rod feeding machines for multiple rods
• ceramic foam filter boxes of various sizes

Hertwich gas assisted VDC billet mould technology in combination with modular mould design provides premium billet surface and metallurgical quality. Robust mould design with high efficient, reliable cooling and smart bleed-out detection ensure long service life and high pit yield.

HDC Tooling for various cross sections produced on horizontal casting machines are available. This covers a big range of diameters and alloys for extrusion and forging billet production as well as different shapes for primary and foundry alloy production.

A new vertical casting plant from Hertwich Engineering in Austria forms the heart of the completely modernized billet caster of Aluminium-Werke Wutöschingen (AWW) in Germany. 

Nordural, Iceland part of Century Aluminium has ordered Hertwich Engineering to supply a complete aluminium billet casthouse with zero greenhouse-gas emissions.