“Nowadays, producers are exploring the notion of the circular economy by rethinking their production methods, such as closed-loop recycling.”
AL Circle: Can you please provide a brief overview of EPIQ Machinery and its role in the aluminium recycling industry? What makes EPIQ Machinery stand out from other companies in the same sector?
EPIQ Machinery: Even before recycling became in vogue and the versatility and multiple uses of aluminium were found applicable in various sectors, under the MECFOR brand, EPIQ supported its secondary plant producers to optimize their operations.
For many years, secondary facilities have been the poor children of industry. To ensure their profitability, it became imperative to have a high-yield pragmatic approach.
This is how the 'Smart Casthouse' solution took off and is now experiencing great enthusiasm for both secondary and primary facilities. Not only for the optimization of the fleet of vehicles needed to perform many tasks in a foundry but especially for the new operator assistance functions thanks to the 'Smart Connect' technology developed by the MECFOR engineering team.
Nowadays, producers are exploring the notion of the circular economy by rethinking their production methods, such as closed-loop recycling. EPIQ has many customers now looking to set up facilities that include their own scrap metal recycling facilities. This ensures a good supply of recycled aluminium for remelting.
With our AD brand, our sawing and packaging systems make the recovery of cutting chips and the management of non-compliant billets facilitated by a fully automated process. This allows the producers better handling options for the remelting of this material into the best possible alloy.
Therefore, AD's expertise in inspection, the precision of cuts, and batching of billets allowing efficient sorting of finished products combined with that of MECFOR Smart Casthouse mobile equipment enable our customers to manage scrap efficiently and safely.
Although, we are not a remelting specialist or involved in the recycling process. Due to our expertise in up-to-date modern materials handling solutions, we can optimize the charging and management of your furnace, utilizing methods that will, in turn, offer overall gains. Our solutions make your process safer, go faster, using energy-efficient methods with minimal auxiliary negative impact.
AL Circle: What challenges does EPIQ Machinery face in the aluminium recycling industry, and how do you address them? Can you share some real-life examples of how you have overcome major obstacles during the recycling process?
EPIQ Machinery: We’ve noticed that the remelting furnaces are getting bigger and that our customers are looking to load more to reduce the number of times they need to open the furnace doors.
In this state of mind, our team developed the ‘MECFOR Furnace Vehicle Telehandler – MFV’. This equipment has a totally new design offering a cab elevation system, telescopic boom, front free wheeled axle, rear steering axle and high lifting capacity. The new MFV is compatible with MECFOR Smart Casthouse technologies using the QuicKonnect system, Operator’s assistance technology and Furnace Protection System (FPS). The MFV allows to pre-charged large boxes with scrap.
Adding to the mobile machine described above, we can add the AD rail-bound charge machine to the overall solution. These machines are capable of loading up to 40,000 lbs of scrap or prime material in one push. As well they reduce the door open time, thus improving the melt rates and reducing heat loss. Like the tending machines, they can be tied to a camera system. Looking into the furnace during the melting cycle to best determine when they need to charge or tend the furnace.
AL Circle: Could you share some innovative technologies EPIQ Machinery utilizes in aluminium recycling processes? How do these technologies contribute to increased efficiency and sustainability?
EPIQ Machinery: Our AD brand has an automatic rotary furnace charge machine. Much like our machine for larger remelt furnaces, this car is designed specifically for rotary furnaces. Rotary furnaces are used to re-process scrap material and dross generated by the typical remelt furnace. These charge machines can operate automatically once loaded with the charge material. It improves the turnaround time for charge and greatly reduces the damage to the refractory ring at the furnace opening generally causes my large lift truck loading practices.
AL Circle: How do you maintain a circular economy in your operations? What is your insight on closed loop recycling system?
EPIQ Machinery: At our facilities, we have processes in place to recycle scraps from our manufacturing activities. Each of our employees is aware of reducing their carbon footprint as much as possible.
AL Circle: Of all your existing material holders, which according to you will be in demand this year?
EPIQ Machinery: What we hear from the market is greater interest in process automation. That includes Auto Guided Vehicle (AGV) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) solutions. Being a company that blurs the line between a technology company and a heavy machinery manufacturer, we continuously seek innovative ways to meet our customers' challenges. This is why we now have this type of equipment available under the EPIQ DTA brand.
If we look further ahead, hyper-connectivity and a systematic approach between all fixed and mobile equipment operating in a smelter will become the next step.
Finally, the electrification of mobile equipment offering is also the talk of the town. All industry players are geared towards achieving the carbon-neutral objective.
As a supplier close to its customers, we stand by them and work on heavy-duty mobile equipment with fully electric motorisation type. We are also looking at electrifying more of our material handling solutions, where you typically see a hydraulic solution. This allows facilities to operate cleaner without having hydraulic leaks contaminate the surrounding area.
