Vedanta’s import substitute billets give a fillip to Make In India

Vedanta is a major producer of high grade aluminium and various other products such as billets and ingots, which are supplied to secondary fabrication units. Although Vedanta has been a significant billet manufacturer for a long time, the requirement spelt out by a new customer - Vikas Altech was a huge challenge.

Even today, the micro tubes in automotive radiators are manufactured from copper. Due to ever changing needs of the customer segments, these tubes are now required to be made from special alloys in which aluminium is the base metal. The application called for a special alloy and that too with a specific post treatment process (homozanization cycle). It also called for specific changes in the casting process like the filtration mechanism, changing the filters from 40ppi to 50ppi, additional degassing process etc. All these actions were important since the end-product to be extruded was of a very thin and hollow profile used in automotive air conditioning heat exchangers and had to be leak-proof. Moreover the alloy (3102M) was not a standard alloy for Vedanta. For this new alloy to be made, most of the intrinsic elements had to be tweaked to suit the requirement. In total, three different alloys have been developed, the other two being AA1050 & AA1100 alloys.

Vikas Altech's Micro Tube application in Heat Exchangers
Courtesy: www.vikasaltech.com

The challenge of casting these specific alloys was taken up and after a development cycle of over a year, it became a reality. In the long term, Vedanta plans to conduct R&D in the heat exchanger market to produce new alloys that will improve the performance of the end products. Now, Vikas Altech has stopped importing billets from overseas suppliers and is procuring the same for multi-port tube applications from Vedanta Aluminium Limited.

According to Harsha Shetty, Vedanta Aluminium's Head Marketing, "Our innovation has not only substituted Copper with Aluminium but has also given the domestic downstream industry an opportunity to Make in India at substantially lower costs while providing better quality to end users." This was the first time that such downstream extrusions started being manufactured in India and specifically, the first time that such kind of billets have been developed in the country. This niche segment right now is worth Rs.250 crores and Vedanta hopes to supply 6% of this demand this fiscal. Gradually this breakthrough product is expected to completely stop India's dependence on imports.

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