Wisdom has two primary techniques for manufacturing cobalt base components: casting and powder metallurgy. Powder metallurgy is suitable for small and regular dimension while casting can apply to wider situations. There are generally four kinds of casting processes: investment, sand, resin shell and centrifugal. Investment casting is what we mostly use.

One advantage of investment casting components is the high precision that can reduce certain machining operations. As a result, this process applies to producing parts with extremely high demands on near-shape and surface quality. Another merit is that it can multiply large quantities of parts with the same shape in one production.

Because of the replication, it may cause exterior and interior defects in investment casting components. The most common ones emerging are surface crack and interior porosity. In terms of surface inspection, Wisdom’s typical castings parts, i.e. bars, sheets and balls, can be examined from following parameters:

  • Bar: tolerance, ovality, bend
  • Sheet: tolerance, roughness, parallelism and straightness
  • Ball: tolerance, sphericity, roughness

In order to prevent from interior flaws, a high quality investment casting needs sectioning testing or NDT (non-destructive testing). Six most frequently used NDT inspection methods are: VT, RT, UT, MT, PT and ET.

WD-Co 6 is the most widely used of the wear resistant cobalt-based alloys and exhibits good all-round performance. It is regarded as the industry standard for general-purpose wear resistance applications, has excellent resistance to many forms of mechanical and chemical degradation over a wide temperature range, and retains a reasonable level of hardness up to 500°C (930°F). It also has good resistance to impact and cavitation erosion. WD-Co 6 alloy material is ideally suited to a variety of hardfacing processes and can be made to investment casting & P/M components. WD-Co 6 casting valve seats are widely used in oil and gas industry.

  • WD Item
    Description
    Application
  • Casting
  • Valve Seat
    Stellite 6, 12
    Oil & Gas
  • Powder Metallurgy
  • Valve Ball
    Stellite 20
    Oil & Gas