In many industrial workplaces, there are several necessary hazards employees must contend with to complete their job. For that reason, it’s employers must take every precaution to make the workplace as safe as possible. To help you get started, here are four easy ways to improve machine guarding in your workplace.
The best place to start is with your heavy machinery. When you invest in a machine guard assessment, experts will inspect your machinery and identify potential hazards you can solve by adding a custom machine enclosure. These enclosures can be made to your specifications to help protect your machines and employees from damage and injury.
Machine guarding made from aluminum is also a solution that doesn’t interfere with your workplace operations. The lightweight nature of aluminum won’t weigh your machinery down, and if the guarding becomes damaged beyond repair, you can recycle the aluminum.
Your business’s attitude toward safety has a profound effect on the rest of your organization. Promoting safety and prioritizing the health of your workers will create a positive culture that encourages everyone to improve safety. Without this culture, many people may begin to cut corners and disregard the safety machine guards can provide, potentially damaging them in their neglect or using the machines in an unintended way.
Another easy way to improve machine guarding in your workplace is to change things up from time to time. Complacency often makes workers go into “auto-pilot” as they go through the motions of the familiar processes. This auto-piloting can make them less aware of their surroundings and increase the likelihood of injury. Keep employees engaged with different safety products and practices so that everyone remains aware of the potential dangers.
Lastly, it’s always a good idea to provide regular training refresher courses to remind employees of the best practices they should use in the workplace. Such training will ensure employees know how to operate machinery and perform their jobs safely and efficiently. Even long-time employees can use these training courses to remind themselves of the small details that may have slipped their minds.
Aluminum has become a popular material used across all sorts of industries thanks to its multitude of benefits. While most industries enjoy aluminum framing systems for their strength-to-weight ratio or incredible versatility, an equally important trait that aluminum has is the ability to resist and endure thermal extremes. Here are three ways aluminum framing systems increase thermal efficiency.
Because of the high thermal conductivity of aluminum extrusions, savvy implementation of a framing system can greatly improve a building’s thermal efficiency. In particular, aluminum is at its best when facing cold temperatures because it becomes stronger, improving its structural integrity. In contrast, its heat conductivity makes aluminum resistant to the corrosion that can occur from extreme heat. Combined with thermal breaks developed in the 1970s, aluminum framing effectively manages heat so that your building doesn’t become damaged or require more resources to keep its climate comfortable.
One the ways aluminum framing systems increase thermal efficiency is by improving a building’s condensation resistance. Condensation is a subtle but major threat to any construction, but the natural corrosion resistance of aluminum makes it much easier to prevent corrosion like rust from occurring. Furthermore, due to the excellent thermal performance of aluminum, condensation has a harder time sapping the heat from a building. Thus, it helps maintain a warm, comfortable interior.
Aluminum sunshades are seamless additions to a framing structure. Using them is one of the most popular ways to improve energy and thermal efficiency. Sunshades are highly customizable and versatile and can fit any construction design without compromising performance. Sunshades help shield a building from harmful UV rays while still allowing a building to have comfortable natural lighting. Aluminum sunshades are the best way to optimize natural lighting while minimizing the discomfort of sunlight and its heat.
Aluminum extrusions have become a mainstay of multiple industries as aluminum structural framing has many incredible qualities, such as being strong yet lightweight and possessing natural corrosion resistance. If you’re wondering how this process works and how it can keep up with the sudden rise in demand, allow us to teach you with this breakdown of the aluminum extrusion process.
There are three main categories of shapes that the aluminum extrusion process can create:
These shapes get made with the same process; it merely depends on the project’s specifications. The specifications inform the required shape of the die so that the aluminum gets pushed into the intended shape. Furthermore, with interlocking designs, these shapes can connect with each other to create more complex extrusions. As a result, aluminum extrusions are much more versatile in their applications than steel materials, which have trouble forming specific shapes or designs.
With this all in mind, let’s get into the individual steps of the aluminum extrusion process.
The extrusion process begins by crafting the die used to create the specific shapes and patterns that create T-slots and other variations of profiles. A round-shaped die gets machined using grade H13 steel to create a specific profile. If a die was already machined in the past for a specific type of profile, aluminum extrusion fabricators will pull it from their warehouse to reduce waste and skip this step altogether.
Before the extrusion can occur, the die gets preheated to approximately 500 degrees Celsius to protect the die’s lifespan and ensure the aluminum flows evenly through the die. Once the die has been sufficiently preheated, it can finally get loaded into the extrusion process.
Once the die gets prepared, a solid cylindrical block of aluminum, called a billet, gets cut from a longer aluminum cylinder – imagine a big log made of aluminum rather than wood. The cut block gets placed into an oven and preheated to between 400 and 500 degrees Celsius so that the aluminum is malleable to manipulate in the extrusion process but not so hot that the metal is molten.
After the die and the billet get preheated, the billet gets transferred to the extrusion process. Because of its high temperature, the transfer occurs mechanically, but a lubricant gets applied to its exterior before the billet gets loaded. This lubricant is also applied to a component called the extrusion ram to prevent the ram and billet from sticking together.
With the billet lubricated and loaded into the extrusion process, the hydraulic extrusion ram pushes the aluminum into the extrusion press container. This hydraulic ram pushes the billet with upwards of 15,000 tons of pressure. As the ram applies pressure, the billet material expands to fill the walls of the container.
As the aluminum billet fills the container, the material begins to press up against the extrusion die. That pressure continues to build as the container fills and eventually becomes so constant and heavy that the aluminum material has nowhere to go except through the die and out the machined opening. The aluminum then emerges from the die in the shape of a fully formed profile.
Once the extrusions have emerged fully formed, a puller grips and guides the extrusions along a runout table at a speed consistent with however quickly the aluminum profiles are emerging from the die. As the profiles get pulled along the runout table, they undergo a process called “quenching.” This is the process of uniformly cooling the profiles in a water bath or with fans.
Quenching the profiles doesn’t fully cool down the extrusions, which is important to note because precise temperatures play an important role moving forward.
An extrusion will reach the full length of the runout table before getting sheared by a hot saw to separate it from the extrusion process. Once fully sheared and made into an independent extrusion, the profile is mechanically transferred once more off the runout table and onto a cooling table.
The extrusions will remain on this table until they have cooled down to room temperature and, once they have, get moved onto the stretching process.
Because the aluminum is still hot and malleable as it exits the die, it’s natural for curving and twisting to have occurred in the extrusions. To straighten them out, the cooled extrusions get moved to a stretcher. Each profile is mechanically gripped on both ends and pulled until the extrusion has straightened out fully and matches the intended specifications.
To cap off this breakdown of the aluminum extrusion process, the table-length extrusions – fully straightened and work-hardened – get transferred to one last table. At the saw table, each extrusion gets sawed to pre-specified lengths – typically between eight and 20 feet.
At this point in the process, the extrusion’s properties match a T4 temper, but can get moved to an aging oven if specifications call for a T5 or T6 temper.
With a better understanding of the aluminum extrusion process, we hope you can see how the production of aluminum extrusions is more efficient for so many industries than the production of steel. A-Line Automations is an experienced aluminum extrusion fabricator. Don’t hesitate to contact us today if you have more questions about the process or need extrusions for your next project.
