March/April 1997
With six secondary aluminum smelting plants in North America, Wabash Alloys claims the distinction of being the world’s largest producer of recycled aluminum casting alloys. Here’s a look at how the firm turns aluminum scrap into alloys used in everything from automobiles to backyard barbecues.
By Eileen Zagone
Eileen Zagone is an associate editor of Scrap.
Looking out the window from his desk in Wabash, Ind.—headquarters of Wabash Alloys—Joe Viland eyes one of the company’s neighbors—a horse—across the train tracks, standing out in the frigid Indiana cold.
The well-chilled horse and the tranquil, bucolic surroundings belie the flurry of round-the-clock activity that enables this, the company’s flagship plant, to produce approximately a million pounds a day of secondary aluminum alloys.
The contrast of picture-perfect corn and soybean fields with the bustle of big-time American industry is all the more appropriate given the decidedly relaxed demeanor of Viland amidst the hubbub.
As president, Viland oversees the firm’s six plants, which collectively produce around 2.5 million pounds of secondary aluminum alloy every day. Its current roster includes facilities in Cleveland; Oak Creek, Wis.; Dickson, Tenn.; Benton, Ark.; and an operation now in Toronto that is scheduled to move to a larger site in Mississauga, Ontario, by August of this year.
Though Wabash Alloys was founded in 1958, its growth spurt didn’t really kick in until 1987 when it became a division of Connell L.P. (Boston), a $1.2-billion privately owned conglomerate that encompasses scrap processing and consuming companies, as well as other industrial businesses.
“Wabash is a big business backed by a big business,” says Jim Diamond, vice president of metal purchasing, explaining that the firm uses its large size—and significant backing—to its advantage. “There’s a lot of security in dealing with Wabash. Our customers know we’re going to be here for a long time.”
So just where does this place Wabash Alloys in the secondary aluminum smelting market? “We’re the market leader thanks to our production volume,” Viland states.
Or, as Diamond likes to put it, “Some people call us the Alcoa of secondaries.”
An Appetite for Scrap
Although the firm’s Wabash facility is its largest, each of its six plants produces the same products: specification secondary aluminum alloys for the die casting and foundry industries. And it’s no exaggeration to call Wabash a secondary because all of the aluminum it produces daily starts out as aluminum scrap.
Though the company purchases scrap “from as far away as Europe, Saudi Arabia, the Commonwealth of Independent States—basically anywhere, as long as the price is good,” says Diamond, most of its scrap feedstock comes from a designated territory around each plant. All told, the company’s buyers purchase about 60 million pounds of scrap a month, with the Wabash facility consuming roughly half.
The Wabash facility, for one, maintains an ongoing relationship with approximately 1,000 suppliers and may buy from 400 or so in a typical month, according to Diamond. “We have an excellent supplier base,” he says. “They tend to send us the same type of scrap each time because it’s what they regularly generate, so we know what to expect from them.”
Nonetheless, he adds, as each shipment arrives, primarily by truck, it is examined visually by a crack team of sorters whose years of experience enable them to “almost smell stainless steel in a pile of aluminum scrap.” But since there are “no small mistakes in the furnace,” he remarks—referring to the hazards of contaminants—the company melts a sample from each incoming load of scrap and determines the material’s precise chemical properties in its on-site analysis lab.
If incoming scrap is deemed furnace-ready, it is moved under roof, labeled according to its metallurgical makeup, and stored with like material in one of many walled bins where it awaits its fiery fate.
Should the incoming scrap require further processing, no problem. Wabash is well-equipped to handle the task. As a result, it can accept a myriad of different scrap grades that may each contain a range of contaminants that must be removed before the material is furnace-ready. Large pieces of scrap, for example, are fed into a hammermill-type shredder that crushes the material into smaller pieces, which are then passed over magnetic belts that pull out ferrous fragments from the usable aluminum.
Aluminum borings and turnings, meanwhile, are drained and then fed into a rotary drum dryer that turns the material as heat from a natural gas flame burns off residual oil and other fluids that cling to the material. Water-soluble fluids generally evaporate, Viland explains, while vapors from oily fluids are burned in an afterburner, with the particulates being caught by baghouses.
Once these various types of scrap are processed to furnace-ready quality, they are labeled and stored along with the firm’s other prepared scrap. At any given time, Wabash holds about three weeks worth of scrap in stock, all of it meticulously inventoried and tracked via computer.
Wabash also consumes its own scrap and residues, most notably the aluminum dross and slag generated by its reverberatory furnaces. This material is a low grade of scrap considered by many to be the throwaway sludge of the industry, says Diamond. At Wabash’s main plant, however, two rotary furnaces subsist on a diet of such dross and slag. By spinning the material in these furnaces and adding salts and other additives, Wabash extracts the aluminum from the residues and returns the metal to the melting operation from whence it came. The unusable leftovers are then disposed of in Wabash’s on-site landfill or at another landfill certified to accept the material.
Molten Magic
For Wabash, the goal of buying and processing scrap is not to end up with piles of pure aluminum to feed to its furnaces. Since its business is making secondary aluminum alloys, that means there are a number of other elements—13, to be exact—that go into the creation of its product. Incoming scrap may possess these elements that, when combined properly, will create a specific alloy with specific properties. “There’s a real science involved here,” says Diamond, joking, “It’s not like making a pot of soup.”
Dennis Luma, vice president of operations, is the man responsible for overseeing that the right ingredients are blended together in the precise measurements needed to cook up masterpieces in the Wabash facility’s nine reverberatory furnaces.
These mammoth melters are heated with natural gas and are continuously fed scrap in exacting amounts through their charge wells. Each furnace holds between 200,000 and 250,000 pounds of glowing molten metal held at about 1,350oF. The liquid metal bath is continually agitated by pumps to ensure the mixture’s metallurgical uniformity, while automated skimming machines remove dross from the surface.
Each furnace shares a baghouse with two other furnaces, which allows the furnaces to melt some material that is a “little bit dirty,” says Viland. The baghouses provide the necessary environmental emissions protection to allow some scrap to bypass the shredding and drying stages of preparation and be charged directly into the furnace.
Once the metal has been fully melted, alloyed, degassed, cleaned, and tested to make sure the alloying elements are in the proper proportion to meet the consumer’s specifications, the molten potion is ready to pour.
Wabash ships about 60 percent of its product in molten form, another 38 percent in 30-pound ingots, and the remainder in 1,000-pound sows.
Molten shipments are poured directly into specialized containers described by Luma as “huge coffee thermoses” that are lined with thick insulation to retain heat. These containers, which hold about 35,000 pounds of metal, are then super-heated under a natural gas flame, sealed, and transported to the casting consumer. Such containers can travel up to about 250 miles before reheating is needed to free the solidifying metal.
Molten metal is shipped on special trucks that have been designed tocarry the container lower than a traditional flatbed truck, thereby lowering the center of gravity on the heavy—and hot—load and reducing the risk of a spill. Upon arrival, the hydraulic truck elevates the container so it can be tapped from an opening at the bottom directly into the consumer’s production operations.
There are distinct advantages to shipping metal in molten form, says Luma, noting that it saves the consumer considerable time and energy compared with melting cold metal and it allows them to use the product immediately, thus minimizing or eliminating the need to maintain extensive ingot or sow inventories.
For consumers that don’t use molten aluminum, Wabash produces alloy ingots and sows by pouring hot metal directly from its furnaces into molds on a continuous conveyor. Workers at the end of the conveyor stack the warm, solidified metal bars onto pallets for storage and eventual shipment. Though these aluminum alloy ingots and sows can travel farther than molten metal, each Wabash plant generally ships within a 400-to-500-mile radius.
Aluminum-Driven
As for the industries that consume Wabash’s varied secondary aluminum products, Viland estimates that 75 percent of the firm’s alloys ends up in the automotive industry, either going directly to casting plants operated by the Big Three, Saturn, or Honda or to die casters that make products for use in domestic automobiles. Wabash, for example, sends approximately one truck of molten metal an hour, around the clock, to a Chrysler plant in Kokomo, Ind. “This is definitely an automotive-driven business,” Viland puns, “and it always has been.”
Another 20 percent of the company’s production goes to die casters that make parts for small engines and appliances, with the balance going into products such as computer parts and barbecues.
And as carmakers have increased their use of aluminum—particularly in engine blocks—to lightweight their vehicles and, thus, improve fuel economy, Wabash has kept pace by increasing production of the needed alloys.
In addition to expanding production to serve its customers, Wabash is now finding it necessary to bring its operations into line with the quality assurance standards of its biggest consumers. In particular, the company ambitiously hopes to meet QS 9000—the Big Three automakers’ quality standard—and achieve ISO 9000 certification, both by the end of this year.
In turn, Wabash is considering requiring its larger scrap suppliers to also meet these quality standards. While achieving these standards is far from easy, the certification process hasn’t been particularly thorny for Wabash thus far, says Viland, because the company already had a number of procedures in place that parallel those required by ISO guidelines.
In the long run, the growth of the secondary aluminum alloy business in general—and Wabash’s in particular—is intricately tied to the growing use of aluminum in automobiles, Viland observes. And as of now, the prospects on that front look encouraging, with virtually every domestic automaker currently manufacturing at least one model with an aluminum engine block, as well as other cast aluminum parts. “Our goal now is to stay as efficient as possible so we can keep our production costs down,” he says.
Of course, that’s not the company’s only goal. Other, more general plans include the possibility of establishing a smelter in Mexico and, in the longer term, one in South America. That makes sense given the automotive industry’s growing interest in these locations.
Does Viland feel a little anxious about leading Wabash into the unknowns of the global marketplace?
No surprise here. True to his decidedly relaxed demeanor, he doesn’t sound worried at all. •
With six secondary aluminum smelting plants in North America, Wabash Alloys claims the distinction of being the world's largest producer of recycled aluminum casting alloys. Here's a look at how the firm turns aluminum scrap into alloys used in everything from automobiles to backyard barbecues.