Demo Facility / Quality Testing
FATA Aluminum counts on a 0.5 tons/hour demo sand regeneration system installed in its facility for state of the art sand testing. This recent investment allows the company to process customers sand both with mechanical or thermal treatments, even combined together for green sand regeneration. Once treated, sand is taken by our laboratory that performs all necessary tests prior to returning it back to the customer together with the laboratory results. Customers have the opportunity to reintroduce the sand into their normal production process to validate autonomously the efficiency of the FATA Aluminum treatment.
Mechanical Reclamation
Due to the fact that bentonite can’t burn, mechanical treatment is needed to reduce dead clay from the sand grain surface. Such treatment allows reintroduction of the sand directly into the mixer, reducing the amount of coal and bentonite to be used. Modular mechanical attrition machines with built-in pneumatic scrubbers are available, engineered to optimize the efficiency and the quality of the final reclaimed sand.
Green Sand Regeneration
FATA Aluminum has developed a dedicated process that removes completely coal and clay from the surface grain. This treatment allows customers to use green sand scraps for the manufacturing of new cores to be used in the foundry. The process consists in a sub sequential mechanical attrition treatment followed by a thermal treatment and a final mechanical step. All the coal is burned up and the clay removed by attrition obtaining 100% pure silica grain at the end of the reclamation. The resulting product is comparable to new sand and can be used to manufacture cores.
Core Sand Regeneration
FATA Aluminum thermal regeneration plants allow customers who use resin bonded core sand to reduce the new sand needs. With temperatures ranging from 550 degrees C to 700 degrees C, FATA ‘s furnaces have the ability to burn away all the resin deposit from the grain, obtaining sand with equal or ever superior quality if compared to new sand, ready to be used in core shops for core molding.
Inorganic Sand Regeneration
Inorganic core sand binders imply considerable advantages such as absence of smoke and odor in the foundry, a drastic reduction of emissions and improvement of energetic efficiency. One of the disadvantages is a higher difficulty in regenerating these types of sands due to some intrinsic technical reasons such as humidity, hardness and reaction of the binder with the sand grain. During the last two years FATA Aluminum R & D engineers have been working hard to find out the optimal recipe to process this sand. Finally, we have come out with a newer line of sand regeneration systems specifically dedicated to such applications. Inorganic resin bonded sands will progressively substitute traditional organic resin bonded sands in the mass production foundries, and FATA Aluminum is already manufacturing what customers need to satisfy their new requirements.