News
J.P. Morgan run in Frankfurt together with the Heck & Becker Roadrunners
Ten colleagues took part in this year’s J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge in Frankfurt with a lot of fun and in the best weather. After preparing together in the previous weeks, the team members were able to achieve their best times while running through Frankfurt’s city center with an inspiring ambience. Afterwards, impressions were shared over a delicious dinner and a great end to a successful afternoon was celebrated.
Bionic design helps to reduce the CO2 footprint
Lightweight casting components require less material and are therefore more sustainable. But what about production?
Not all of the molten material ends up in the finished component, but is needed for the gating system. Although this part can be 100% recycled, a lot of energy is still required for remelting.
Together with Bionic Mesh Design GmbH and Altair, we are working on a project to reduce the proportion of the gating system in the production process chain and thus its carbon footprint through optimization and casting simulation.
Saving CO2 as an essential task for the future
What is becoming increasingly important in private environments has been an undeniable issue for the industry: The efficient and responsible use of resources while reducing CO2 emissions is the key task of our generation.
This topic has also a high weight for us at Heck & Becker. In recent years, our family-owned company has invested in increasing efficiency and resource conservation in all energy-intensive areas. One major component was the newly installed melting and heat-retaining furnace for our Diecasting Technology Center at the end of 2019. It provides molten aluminium for the production of die-cast parts and has saved 347 tons of CO2 annually since then.
Furthermore, investments were already made in 2015 in an efficient supply of compressed air for all areas of the company, which at the same time makes the waste heat from the compression process usable for production. This eliminated leaks, reduced air requirements and ultimately saved electricity and CO2 emissions to a considerable extent. Since then, a total of more than 1,500 tons of CO2 have been saved!
But that is by no means the end of the story: At the beginning of this year, the air compressor and heat recovery module were replaced by a smarter and more efficient model to further increase efficiency.
The future is electrified
As a partner of the Ford site in Cologne for decades, Heck & Becker is involved in the development towards an electric future for the automotive industry. “We are delighted that Ford continues to place its trust in Heck & Becker and has placed a large package for the development and construction of high-pressure die-casting dies for the E-Drive platform at Heck & Becker,” says managing director Martin Baumann. Over the next two years, high-pressure die casting tools for these E-Drive components will now be developed, designed and built together with the experts from Cologne. “An important part of the development is the close-to-production testing of the tools in our in-house Die Casting Technology Centre, where we can cast the first components even before the start of series production. This simplifies and shortens the start of series production at Ford tremendously and gives our customer a confident feeling for the start of his production,” says Benjamin Jung, member of the executive board at Heck & Becker and responsible for sales and application technology.
The first milestone was reached in late summer: For the “Motor Housing”, the heart of the new electric drive, the first high-pressure die-casting tool was successfully sampled last week at Heck & Becker and the first castings were made available to Ford for further processing. A ground-breaking step for all parties of the project. Within the next months further tools for different variants of the “Motor Housing” will be built at Heck & Becker and tested in the Die Casting Technology Centre.