iTherm® TECHNOLOGY
iTherm® Product perfomance
Special engineering of iTherm® components assures long in-service life with significant indirect savings in maintenance, machine downtime, while its thermal characteristics is superior to copper pistons.
DURABILITY
In-service performance of iTherm® Piston
A single body iTherm® piston with an innovative Internal Cooling System presents an optimum solution for the reduction of cycle time in HPDC and improved in-service life.
iTherm® system provides the highest cooling effectiveness while improving: productivity, cast part quality, piston durability.
This tip is a critical component of the shot end for HPDC, where other cooling solutions on the market involve complicated multi-piece assemblies and often Beryllium-Copper (BeCu) alloys.
The HTS iTherm® shot tip is a single piece tip made of hardened tool steel, with a tempered steel ring providing a wear point to extend the service life of both the shot tip and the shot sleeve.
For an average size shot tip (~100mm in diameter), a BeCu tip can be expected to last 4,000-7,000 shots. An iTherm® shot tip of the same size can be expected to last 50,000-80,000+ shots, with the rings lasting 20,000-30,000 shots.
Shown below, an iTherm® shot tip, still in operation after 91,000 shots and 3x ring changes (every 30,000 shots).
It has been known for a long time that steel tips last much longer than BeCu tips, but many still use BeCu to improve the cooling capacity of the tip near the biscuit.
With iTherm® tips, the conformal cooling of the steel allows the heat removal rate to exceed that of BeCu tips. This means that die casters finally have a solution that allows for a maximum component lifetime AND maximum cooling power.
On average, die casters that implement an iTherm® shot tip save 7-15% of cycle time on systems limited by biscuit cooling. Further cycle time reductions can be achieved by implementing conformal cooling on shot blocks and die cores or cavities.
HTS is corporate member of NADCA
