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Member News
Additionally, SMS group is the spearhead of Additive Manufac- turing in the industry. SMS group already uses additively manufac- tured components in its plants and has been strongly promot- ing the development of highly specialized metal powders. SMS group uses its powder atomiza- tion plant in Mönchengladbach, Germany, not only for the produc- tion of high-purity metal powders for additive manufacturing applications, but also develops new design and manufacturing methods there.
New horizons
SMS group will be presenting its innovations under the umbrella topic “New Horizon”. In more than 150 years as a player in the metallurgical plant engineering sector, SMS group has accumu- lated a wealth of expertise based on which it has started to address urgent and future-oriented topics in a concerted approach: How will we be using raw materials in the future, or energy and our environ- ment? How do we go about topics like mobility, urbanization and the communications sector?
According to Burkhard Dahmen, Chairman of the Managing Board of SMS group GmbH, metallic materials are the drivers of the current megatrends: “Metals are essential for our future: high mobility, urban life or intensive communication would be impossi- ble without metals. Therefore, we develop technologies for the com- plete life cycle of metals. We offer technologies that extract and process metals in an economically ef cient and, at the same time, eco-friendly way, and allow them to be recycled virtually endlessly back into the raw material cycle.
With our “New Horizon” offensive, SMS group is gearing up for future markets.”
Against the backdrop of con- stantly decreasing resources of metals that are crucial for the application of new technologies – such as nickel, cobalt, alumin- ium oxide, titanium, vanadium, lithium or rare earths – SMS group has developed new, pro table processes for the extraction of metals from secondary sources and sources that could only be exploited with limited ef ciency in the past. Besides that, SMS group designs resource-saving, inte- grated plant solutions for primary and secondary process routes in non-ferrous metals production within the joint venture PolyMet Solutions. The Luxembourg SMS group company Paul Wurth devel- ops new CO2-free steelmaking techniques that make for a sig- ni cantly smaller CO2 footprint of the steel industry. Cooperating with Sun re, a company based in Dresden, Germany, Paul Wurth is taking a direct reduction process to market maturity, in which the fossil element carbon is substi- tuted with hydrogen, and from which no climate-damaging CO2 arises, only water vapor. In this context, Paul Wurth also engages in the research of systems for the production of green hydrogen, which is produced exclusively with renewable energy. In a coopera- tion with UrbanGold GmbH from Austria, SMS group has developed an economically ef cient process able to recover and feed back into the raw material cycle high-grade, valuable materials previously con- sidered as lost materials from electric and electronic scrap – e.g. gold, silver, platinum, nickel or copper. A rst plant for the recy-
cling of electronic circuit boards will be started up shortly.
SMS group is a group of com- panies internationally active in plant construction and mechani- cal engineering for the steel and nonferrous metals industry. It has some 14,000 employees who gen- erate worldwide sales of more than EUR 3 billion. The sole owner of the holding company SMS GmbH is the Familie Weiss Foundation.
For Burkhard Dahmen, the SMS group booth at METEC will be above all a forum for talks: “The last few years have seen contin- ual talk of digitalization, Industry 4.0 and additive manufacturing at the steel producers and processors as well as at their suppliers. We already feel the heavy impact of new technologies and new pro- duction methods in our world of work. We will see this impact cause even more change at an ever faster pace in the future. Since last METEC we have seen a great many changes taking place in many different areas. Against this background, we look forward to speaking with our customers as the Leading Partner in the World of Metals about the challenges posed by these megatrends – and to proposing possible solutions. In this way, we can help our cus- tomers stay competitive in a glo- balized market environment.”
SMS group GmbH
Ohlerkirchweg 66
41069 Mönchengladbach Germany
Tel: +49 2161 350 0 Fax: +49 2161 350 1667
communications@ sms-group.com www.sms-group.com
ITAtube Journal No3/October 2019
41