The StrikoWestofen Group has acquired the expertise of BPR-Engineering GmbH from Rheda-Wiedenbrück to be able to offer customers the heat treatment of cast aluminium parts - in particular cast structural parts.
The global market leader in the field of dosing and melting furnaces for the light metal industry made the decision to be able to react to the growing trend towards optimising mechanical properties using heat treatment.
The takeover of the employees of BPR-Engineering in May meant that 20 years of know-how in this field was acquired all at once. “The agreement with the employees was less a takeover in the classical sense and more a buying-in of know-how,” explains Rudi Riedel, CEO of the StrikoWestofen Group. With their know-how, the 18 new employees in this business unit cover the entire range from the development and projecting of hardware and software to the commissioning and approval of the systems.
The new heat treatment business unit forms a holistic approach - furnaces, quenching systems and product carriers are not seen as individual components of a system but as an overall concept. This allows enormous cost savings due to the better co-ordination of processes. Also, the components are less susceptible to deformation, which reduces the necessary alignment work. “That saves hard cash too,” points out Frank Herkenräder, company founder of BPR-Engineering and head of the new Striko heat treatment business unit. “For one of our customers, the optimised concept resulted in over 80 per cent of the alignment work being unnecessary. This means savings of approx €3 million in two years.”
The available systems cover all phases of the heat treatment process. In four-storey continuous furnace systems, up to three different types of cast parts can be heat-treated at the same time. The modular system also allows flexible adaptation to the customer needs in each case. The same is true for the chamber furnace systems, which are especially suitable for the heat treatment of smaller numbers of pieces or of frequently changing ranges of parts. They consist of four to 22 furnaces, each of which can run a recipe of its own in parallel. In addition, StrikoWestofen is the technology trailblazer with regard to combined air-water quenching systems for especially high-quality cast parts. Product carriers adapted to the components and made of a particularly heat-resistant stainless steel alloy complete the range.
Riedel sums up the situation: “It was a logical step for us to expand our core competencies by adding the heat treatment business unit. By taking over Frank Herkenräder and his team, we have found a company that shares our philosophy. In the future, too, our mission will be to offer the technically most perfect, most sustainable and most economical furnaces on the market.”
John Paterson, Striko UK Ltd, Tel: +44 (0) 1889 271155, email: [email protected]