Gas shielded electro-slag remelting of steels

An innovative simulation of advanced protective gas electro-slag-remelting project for the production of high-quality steels is financed by the European Commission Research Fund for Coal and Steel.

ESI Group of France has announced its participation in two European Union projects: ISA-PESR (Integrative Simulation of Advanced Protective Gas Electro-Slag Remelting) and IMPRESS (Intermetallic Materials Processing in Relation to Earth and Space Solidification).

ESI Group's metallurgical development team has been selected for its proven ability to develop and implement accurate material models which simulate complex solidification and solid-state transformation phenomena.

The ISA-PESR project started in September 2004 for a duration of three years.

This is an innovative project dedicated to the simulation of advanced protective gas electro-slag-remelting for the production of high-quality steels.

It is financed by a research programme from the European Commission Research Fund for Coal and Steel.

ESI Group participates in the programme by developing specific solvers enabling the modelling of complex electromagnetic interactions during the casting process.

A commercial module tailored to the needs of the remelting industry will be developed and coupled with the casting-simulation software available from ESI Group.

The project is coordinated by the Montan University of Leoben in Austria with the participation of prestigious partners such as ALD Vacuum Technologies in Germany, Boehler Edelstahl in Austria and Centro Sviluppo Materiali in Italy.

The second programme is IMPRESS, which started in November 2004 for a duration of five years.

This project is part of the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission, coordinated by the European Space Agency.

Calcom ESI, ESI Group's Swiss subsidiary, is directly funded by the Swiss Secretariat for Education and Research.

The goal of the project, in which 41 European institutes and companies are participating, is to understand the critical link between material processing, material structure and the material properties of novel higher-performance multi-functional intermetallic alloys, and to transfer this new knowledge into breakthrough prototypes tailored for extreme applications such as turbine blades and fuel cells.

Calcom ESI will contribute to this ambitious project by concentrating its efforts on coupled casting and heat treatment simulation, the prediction of material properties altered by porosity and the assessment of the solid state transformation during heat treatment.

For this study, a close collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has already been initiated.

"These close collaborations with visionary companies and leading Universities and Research Institutes enable ESI Group to further develop its casting solutions and thereby to continuously provide industries worldwide with improved, reliable and sophisticated software products," says Marco Gremaud, business development director of Casting Solutions within ESI Group.

Casting-process simulation is now widely accepted as an important tool in product design and process development to improve casting yield and quality.

ESI Group's casting portfolio includes ProCAST, the market-leading finite-element solution for casting-process simulation, CALCOSOFT, for fast and efficient modeling of continuous casting processes and PAM-QUIKCAST, the finite difference solution for casting-process evaluation.

* About ESI Group - ESI Group is a pioneer and world-leading supplier of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials.

ESI Group has developed an entire suite of coherent, industry-oriented applications to simulate a product's behaviour realistically during testing, to fine-tune the manufacturing processes in accordance with the desired product performance, and to evaluate the environment's impact on product usage.

ESI Group's products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative, virtual engineering solution, known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous manner.

By drastically reducing costs and development lead times, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantages and make it possible to eliminate gradually the need for physical prototypes.

This integrated protocol allows all the company's solutions to work with each other and with applications developed by independent software vendors.

By significantly reducing costs and development lead times and enabling product/process synergies, VTOS solutions progressively eliminate the need for physical prototypes during product development, thus offering major competitive advantages.

ESI Group is listed on the Eurolist compartment C of Euronext Paris, and generated sales of EUR 60 million in 2004.

The company employs almost 500 high-level specialists worldwide, and covers more than 30 countries.

Virtual Try-Out Space and VTOS are registered trademarks of ESI Group.

All other products, names and companies mentioned in this press release are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Back to top