Aluminium - Enriching A Billion Lives

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 exc...

It is quite interesting what you’ll find on forums hosted by Tesla Motors. Innovation is the DNA of the company which compels it to place value on experimentation and improvement. In a similar forum where the discussions took a turn on cutting down the weight of a car and thus reduce the expenditure of energy from the batteries, the use of aluminium was heavily stressed upon. Its weight is much lesser than steel and can carry a lot more stress. Initially, aluminium was mostly used in making the high end cars like the Audi A8. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Land Rover, Jaguar all followed suit after learning the versatility of the metal. But of late, its applications have found way into mass market models like the Ford F150 truck. Audi can afford to include the best of all the worlds in a single car and mark its price up at high premium. But Ford’s insight and courage to make a near  100% aluminium F150 model, a mass market model which has persistently been the highest selling v...