Cronite’s Know-How is an alloy of 3 skills constantly developed through one century:
Metallurgy :
Cronite has always been involved in adjusting the alloying elements in its Irons or Steels to reach the best compromise of specifications & prices.
Cronite has normalised close to 200 alloys, some being dedicated to a single usage, of product. Most of them are HRxx, HR standing for Heat Resistant, some others are trademarks like Mancellium or Cronial.
Cronite recently launched its CR alloy technology, CR is standing for Carburization Resistant, from CR01 to CR06, with the objective of overcoming the problem of compromising between working temperatures, chemical resistance & price. The CR alloys offer a resistance to carbon and at the same time can face working conditions far over 1000°C, with a limited usage of high price alloying elements. CR alloys can also help the castability, which gives more flexibility to the designers to improve the Weight Yield Ratio.
The Weight Yield Ratio is the “Treated parts weight” into the “total furnace load”, it is very useful in heat Treatment to evaluate a fixturing solution. Ideal Ratio is 1, which would mean 100% of the energy used in a furnace (heating & cooling) is spent for the parts. Cronite has doubled this ratio in the last 20 years, and reaches on a usual base 0.8.
Cronite CZ, is not relying on literature, instead Cronite’s research center has measured all relevant characteristics and specified all these alloys, within its own lab. All the values & modulus such as strength, chemical resistance, creep resistance, thermal shocks resistance, fatigue, liquidus and e-solidification parameters are in Cronite’s database.
Foundry :
Cronite is a steel foundry specialist, melting and pouring a large range of different materials, using all kinds of processes such as green and resin sands, investment casting, and centrifugal. Cronite has a full digital chain program, which links all the digital step of a casting from the design to the finishing, including, casting simulation, designing and manufacturing of the pattern.
We have exclusive expertise such as:
- Bimetallic static casting (process patented)
- Bimetallic spun tubes
- Mix CFC & Steel solutions,
- No pattern casting for prototyping
- Double OD spun tubes
- 5mm sand cast networks.
Cronite has a century of experience in pushing further the frontier of the foundry technology.
Design :
Last but not least, the design office of Cronite represents 80 years experience in designing dedicated or standard solutions for the handling of heat treat parts through most of the hot processes.
Of course Cronite’s Designers are optimizing the Weight Yield Ratio, but also anticipate clearances between the parts to be treated and the fixtures. The design office alose optimize the circulation of process gases and the convection in order to have the most homogeneous result for its customers.
The designing software industry comes, each new decade with revolutionary improvement. Cronite keeps its Design office up to date state of the art technology. In 2018, Cronite is now challenging its own design base, using AI software to reduce the weight of all its standard or semi-standard products.
Pushing the Innovation
Cronite continuously develops New range of alloys and Products to meet new customer’s expectations in the changing environment.
We invite you to read Challenge us where you can discover the recent developments.
To support these activities, we reinvest over 4% of our turnover in Research & Development.
Our sites make use of CAD/CAM software, interconnected throughout our plants, tensile-strength calculation modules and creep testing machines (with quenching), and implement custom-designed joint research and testing protocols in collaboration with our customers.
We combine the FEA methodology, used at Cronite for almost 20 years, with the most recent Topology optimization approach.
With our prototyping equipment, 3D validation of new designs becomes both rapid and simple.
Our international team of experts
Our international team of designers, metallurgists and engineers based around the world is permanently focused on optimizing our customer solutions. All our sites work in collaboration as part of a multidisciplinary process involving both our technical and marketing teams to ensure the same design features and levels of quality in Europe, America and Asia, and that our products meet all customer specifications.