Today spray forming has just started its commercial exploitation and can fill the gap between conventional casting and powder metallurgy, having advantages like rapid solidification, finegrained microstructures, absence of macro segregation and structural homogeneity even in complex tool steel alloy systems. The production of a spray formed billet requires significantly less steps than the classical powder metallurgy or the conventional ESR technology, and the risk of oxidation and contamination of the steel is low. Together with these benefits, the process also shows a dramatically lowering in production time, cost and energy. Production of medium size volumes in spray formed billets with respect to market flexibility can also avoid expensive stock holding. This presentation describes the industrial tool steel spray forming plant at Dan Spray ltd. for making billets with a weight of up to 4 tonnes and the economics in using this technology compared to the conventional technologies.
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