Iron Powder is produced in many different grades for a variety of applications. Combined with a denser charge make-up results in lower energy requirements and faster melting time in steel manufacture. The demand for HPI, as a water atomized powder, continues to increase as it is commonly used in the automotive industry, powder metallurgy and magnetic materials.
Ironveld’s Competitive Advantage
- Costs Most iron powder producers do not possess captive mines, and instead are reliant on buying in raw materials. Traditional raw materials supply typically accounts for up to 70% of production costs. Ironveld’s captive ore and by-product credits therefore represent significant competitive advantages, which should result in Ironveld being positioned in the bottom cost quartile (or possibly even at the bottom of the cost curve after by-product credits), we believe.
- State-of-the-Art Technology Powder Metallurgy manufacturing techniques offer many potential advantages over traditional ‘ingot metallurgy’ processes.
• Components can be produced with very-complex shapes (e.g. spur and helical gears in the automotive industry) that would be difficult or impossible with traditional manufacturing techniques (i.e. greater ‘design freedom’ is available). PM components can be significantly lighter than cruder equivalents yielded by traditional techniques.
• Fewer production steps and less machining are required, resulting in lower energy utilisation and significantly reduced material wastage (near-100% utilisation or ‘near-net’ shape processing is possible), and therefore significantly lower production costs. PM is thus often described as a ‘green’ technology.
• Properties of the final component can be tailored relatively easily, e.g. other metals can be mixed into the powder blend to impart hardness and wear resistance, self-lubrication can be imparted via porosity control.
• A wider range of metal compositions is possible; with traditional techniques, certain metal mixtures are incompatible or impossible due to chemical, thermal and containment constraints.