Previously doing business as KW Associates LLC, the firm was renamed Ampere Scientific in 2016. New manufacturing technology crafted by Ampere Scientific could mean major energy-cost savings in the specialty metals industry. The firm has developed a system that added during the melting process to titanium and nickel refining furnaces could significantly reduce waste and improve safety. VAR furnaces, developed decades ago generate an electric arc, or plasma column that melts a consumable electrode, burning off impurities and creating a large ingot of the specialty metal then sold to manufacturers. With that arc impossible to see, previously there could be no fine tune control of the process - electrical energy loss - plus process created buildup on ingot surface that had to be removed. The small fir'ms Arc Position Sensing technology offers a way to "see" what is happening inside a VAR furnace during the remelting process. Integrating an electric current locator with automated data acquisition and realtime analysis, the system monitors arc dynamics during operation enabling major energy cost savings while also improving ingot quality. OSU researchers are independently validating the system identifying the patterns to support development of a software tool that would automatically identify, categorize and track potentially harmful events.
