VDM Metals Japan K.K.
Company Introduction
VDM Metals, headquartered in Werdohl, Germany, is part of the High Performance Alloys division of the Acerinox Group. VDM Metals develops and manufactures nickel, copper, cobalt and zirconium alloys as well as high-alloyed special stainless steels. High-performance materials made by VDM Metals pass very stringent quality control. They are used in mission-critical applications and many of today's key technologies for large-scale implementation and safe handling of corrosive and high-temperature processes and procedures. Each one of the company’s alloys is characterized by a unique combination of properties, depending on their chemical composition and the manufacturing process. For over 90 years, VDM Metals has been supplying sheet, strip, bar, wire, welding consumables and powder to customers in the chemical process and plant engineering, power generation, oil and gas, electrical and electronics, automotive and aerospace industries. VDM Metals employs around 2,000 people worldwide.
About Our Additive Manufacturing Business and Products
VDM Metals offers a broad portfolio of nickel, cobalt-chromium and stainless materials for the dedicated use in additive manufacturing techniques. The company can rely on its outstanding experience with the development and production of conventionally manufactured wrought alloys, such as VDM® Alloy 59, Alloy 625, Alloy 699 XA or Alloy 780.
Constantly increasing requirements in many industries raise the demand for new technologies and processes. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a comparatively new group of manufacturing processes, which has made rapid progress in recent years. AM best fulfils industrial niches which require a low production volume of parts, and complex designs that formative or subtractive manufacturing methods are unable to produce. In the process of selecting components suitable for AM, some further aspects should be considered such as material production costs (including virgin metals and alloy production costs), customization degree – usually combined with the opportunity for improvement of performance efficiency – or part size. In many cases, AM is seen as a performance enabler, rather than a cost-reduction enabler. What needs to be accounted for is the benefit derived versus euros spent. In this case, material performance becomes a key factor.
In case of conventional corrosion and high-temperature resistant wrought alloys, the focus in the development of most of these materials was generally on the further processing properties, such as weldability. This makes them the perfect candidates for use in AM. Unfortunately, the use of established nickel-base alloys designed for casting is not viable because of their specific thermodynamic properties, such as phase precipitation kinetics and crack susceptibility, unless the processing side of AM, including post-processing, progresses significantly.
VDM Metals is your ideal partner when it comes to challenging environments, customized material properties and first-class technical customer support.
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