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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 exc...

AAI hosts the national seminar on Aluminium - The Strategic Metal

What’s up? What had you been up to this week? I’d been to the national level seminar on ‘ Aluminium – The Strategic Metal ’ this Thursday. It was organised by the Aluminium Association of India (AAI) and presided over by the Union Mines Secretary - Mr. Balwinder Kumar and others. It was quite interesting to know about developments in the aluminum industry. Plus the venue was Hotel Mayfair. Who could miss that? Now tell me what happened there? In the welcome address by Dr. TK Chand, the president of AAI and CMD of NALCO, he began by pointing out that Aluminium metal is always associated with 3 important words – ‘Strategic, Green & Future’. The metal has numerous applications and that Odisha has more than half of the country’s bauxite reserves. However, all is not well at the moment. Sluggish market conditions, vagaries of the commodity cycle, cheap imports from China & the Middle East has hit the Indian Aluminum Industry quite badly. Even though ...