Materion Beryllium & Composites, a Materion Corporation business, announced today the completion of a significant milestone of its capabilities and operations for proprietary investment cast AlBeCast® aluminum beryllium products. Materion is the world's only mine-to-mill integrated beryllium producer, providing an assured, long-term source of beryllium.
Over the last three years the Materion flagship manufacturing facility in Elmore, Ohio has developed and completed a state-of-the-art investment casting capability to benefit technically demanding customers in the aerospace, defense and precision industrial equipment industries.
Commenting on this progress, Mike Anderson, President, Materion Beryllium & Composites, said, "Customers have long turned to Materion for material solutions for some of their toughest end-use challenges. This expansion extends our product offering for aluminum beryllium materials by offering rapid prototyping and solidification modeling to provide investment cast parts to customers with short lead times and competitive pricing."
Larry Ryczek, Vice President Sales and Marketing, Materion Beryllium & Composites, added, "Materion's world class casting team, complemented by our SPADE group (Special Product and Application Development Engineering), enables us to now provide finished parts into a range of customers. The AlBeCast® product line complements the powder metallurgy-derived AlBeMet® to offer customers a greater choice of options for their material needs."
Aluminum beryllium castings provide favorable cost/benefit advantages for customers requiring a combination of ultra-light weight, stiffness, mechanical stability and thermal properties.
Beyond its AlBeCast® product line for precision cast component applications, Materion offers customers a wide range of high-performance powder metallurgy-based products of beryllium, beryllium-containing alloys and non-beryllium metal matrix composites.
The casting investment follows a major expansion of the Elmore facility's primary beryllium production capacity undertaken over the past several years as part of an innovative private-public partnership between Materion and the U.S. Department of Defense. This capability will support the beryllium product lines for the defense and critical civilian needs.
Materion Corporation is headquartered in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. The Company, through its wholly owned subsidiaries, supplies highly engineered advanced enabling materials to global markets. Products include precious and non-precious specialty metals, inorganic chemicals and powders, specialty coatings, specialty engineered beryllium alloys, beryllium and beryllium composites, and engineered clad and plated metal systems.