Manufacturing in China Blog

Titanium 1. Corrosion Resistance Titanium is a material with excellent corrosion resistance. It is able to withstand attack by acids, chlorine elements in water and fluorine and its compounds. Titanium actually forms a passive oxide layer when it comes into contact with any oxygen a property which serves to enhance its corrosion resistance even further. It is thus understandable why such a material would be desired in such oxygen rich environments as the human body. 2. High Strength Titanium is an extremely strong material. Its strength matches that of common low grade steel alloys and as a result titanium is extensively used in aerospace and industrial applications....

PA International is one step ahead of the rest with its unique spotless spot-welding technique for demanding fabrication projects. This is just one of the many advanced processes PA International delivers to its customers worldwide. With years of manufacturing experience, PA International has developed expertise and processes that are guaranteed to deliver low cost, superior metal fabrication services from China to manufacturers in Australia. Combining efficient technology with the intelligent use of materials and years of expertise, PA International provides the complete sheet metal manufacturing solution. Whether a company requires single part, high volume production or one-off prototypes, they can access...

There are many test results floating around the internet talking about thermal conduction of heat sinks or other dedicated heat dissipating devices. This test focus on PCB’s thermal parameters that concern developers during the design stages of high power circuits. We are going to test 1.7mm Aluminium PCB, 4 layers PCB and 6 layers PCB.The test device consists of power diode that dissipates 25Watt of heat and aluminium heat sink of fixed size and airflow. We measure temperature of the diode at fixed load and subtract ambient temperature from it to get ‘temperature rise above ambient’. To test PCB thermal...

The history of electrochemical oxidation of aluminium dates back to the beginning of the last century. Anodic treatment of aluminum were intensively investigated to obtain protective and decorative films on its surface [1].  More recently, applications of porous alumina with a huge surface area and a relatively narrow pore size distribution have been exploited [2]. For example, several attempts to fabricate inorganic membranes have been reported [3, 4, 5]. Nowadays, porous alumina is one of the most prominent template materials for synthesis of nanowires or nanotubes with monodisperse controllable diameter and high aspect ratios [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,12, 13,...

Optimizations for heat sink thermal performance often result in solutions that are not practical to implement either from a component availability or manufacturability point of view. This review describes the optimization process for a parallel fin heat sink with a dedicated fan for cooling. Some of the factors considered are fin thickness and density, fin height, overall lenght, and performance. The constraining factors are choice of fan and associated fan performance curve, weight, cost, and manufacturing technology. The technology places limitations on fin geometry. The emphasis is illustrating the complexity of the process and the number of factors to consider when...

Bending is a manufacturing process by which sheet metal can be deformed by plastically deforming the material and changing its shape. The material is stressed beyond its yield strength but below its ultimate tensile strength. There is little change to the materials surface area. Bending generally refers to deformation about one axis only. Bending is a flexible process by which a variety of different shapes can be produced though the use of standard die sets or bend brakes. The material is placed on the die, and positioned in place with stops and/or gages. It is held in place with hold-downs. The...

We all know that Extruded Aluminium heatsink will perform better than flat and low cost Stamped Metal heatsink, given the same size. But how much better is the diecast or extruded heatsink over just a flat aluminium plate? Lets do some testing, we will perform three separate tests. Finned heatsink, aluminium plate of the same size as heatsink and aluminium plate with the fan forced cooling. Test rig consist of 70 Watt thermal load applied by the centrally mounted resistor. The heat sink size is 100mm wide and 250mm long. Thickness of the fabricated aluminium plate is 4.0mm and extruded part...

Aluminium extruded and die cast heat sinks dominate the industry. As devises that require cooling becoming smaller and heat generation increases, companies are forced to look for a more efficient cooling solutions. One of them is FORGED heat sinks. Comparing extruded heat sink design to bonded fins type assembly, extrusions will outperform by large margin due to bonded assembly thermal transfer is somewhat reduced by the bonding agent added thermal resistance. There are four common techniques that are used to manufacture heat sinks: Die Casting, Machining, Extrusion and Forging. Let’s discuss performance of each of those types of heat sinks, excluding...

Ferrite toroid transformers provide an often convenient and very effective shape for many wide band, pulse and power transformers and inductors. The continuous magnetic path yields the highest effective permeability and lowest flux leakage of any shape. Basic considerations: The inductance may be calculated from (the units are in CGS system which is used throughout this catalog). Here le and Ae are the effective magnetic path length and cross sectional area of the core, . is the effective permeability of the material, and N is the number of turns. This formula may be used for any shape under all conditions provided...

HEATSINK OPTIMIZATION Introduction Optimal design of a heatsink, meeting program targets for cost, weight, size, and performance, is one of the more challenging activities within most electronics engineering teams. Without a dedicated solver, designers or thermal engineers can be involved in a game of ‘opinioneering’, which typically involves overdesign, or initiate an expensive and time-consuming physical design of experiments that provides limited results. In the case study below, we worked to optimize an extruded aluminum heat sink for an IGBT module in a low-cost, high-volume design. Reliability requirements (10-year life), harsh environments (vibration, elevated temperature), limited ability to perform maintenance (consumer...

THERMOELECTRIC HEAT SINK, MODELING AND OPTIMIZATION Proper design and optimization of a thermoelectric (TE) heat sink has been a topic of some neglect in the design of the TE cooling systems. Collectively, TE material researchers have spent tens of millions of dollars to advance the performance level of TE materials only to have it dashed away by ineffective heat sink design. The combination of detailed thermal modeling and high-speed personal computers makes it no less effort to fully optimize a heat sink design then to just derive one that "works." Of course, derivation of a thermal model employing accurate calculations for...

Purpose: In the technical 6082 Aluminium alloys besides the intentional additions Mg i Si, transition metals and impurities (Fe and Mn) are always present. Even not large amount of these impurities causes the formation a new phase components. The exact composition of the alloy and casting condition will directly influence the selection and volume fraction of intermetallic phases. During casting of 6082 alloys, a wide variety of Fe-containing intermetallics phases Al-Fe, Al-Fe-Si and Al-Fe-Mn-Si are formed among the aluminium dendrites. The aim of this work was to examine the composition and morphology of complex microstructure of the intermetallics in 6082 aluminium...

Digital marketing and social media courses help businesses get back on their feet September 29, 2012 Brisbane City Council has helped local engineering solutions company, P&A International, build its online presence through free, nationally accredited digital marketing and social media training courses which started in July and finished in early November. Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said demand for the four day courses had been overwhelming, with all of the seven classes completely booked. “These courses were available to small and medium sized business owners affected by the floods and, as each of the workshops took one day to complete, the...

Over the last years “sourcing in China” became  part of our life. I mean, who will argue that it is a  bad idea when world most valuable company  Apple trust manufacturing of its highly  technological and world best selling Iphone, that represents large chunk of company revenue – to  the Chinese company Foxcon. People on the  street seem to be satisfied to, many praise quality  and finish of the beautiful new phone.   Many manufacturers now chase up factories in  China and send them drawings and  manufacturing files to quote. It all appear fairly  simple: locate the business in China you...

Let’s outline number of most common China Sourcing Scams going on at the moment: Email hacking. This is when a person or a group of people hack emails server of a company and watch it for some time. They select usually largest customer and redirect all the communication, presenting them self’s as original company. Aim of the game is to present invoice for prepayment of goods with new bank account details in order to steal the funds. Fake Factory. Usually a single person show, when a copy of some Chinese company website is created and unsuspected customers are lured in to...

This is a good valve machined by FORGE (FMDVSUPR) with very high air flow rate, but distinctly slow acting. Say you have FORGE diverter valve like me, and say like me you are unhappy with it’s reaction / activation time. There are few causes some of which I intend to trial to rectify. A short summary of areas to tackle: -Heavy piston -Large piston volute (takes time to evacuate) -Small vacuum line (Forge offers cap with larger fitting) There are number of things you can do about it. I will start with heavy piston. As supplied by Forge, it’s weight is...

Advantages of using copper over aluminium for heat sinks are often discussed. If you look at high end CPU coolers for personal computers market for example, you will see extended use of copper. Coper thermal conductance is 4.01 W/cmK and aluminium is 2.37 W/cmK. With copper thermal conductivity so much higher that aluminium one would expect significant performance difference in real world. Let’s run some thermal tests. We have set up a test rig consisting of 200mm X 200mm X 2mm copper and aluminium plates. A heat source was chosen as power mosfet and was mounted in the middle of...

The China is still most attractive option when sourcing manufacturing offshore. Even if duties on many products are increased, there are still significant advantages in manufacturing in the Peoples Republic of China. With a population of 1.3 billion, the China display huge capacity to manufacture consumer and industrial products. Labor is relatively inexpensive, although rising, by the standards of the developed world and competitive with those in many other low-cost countries. But for companies that still don't have a presence in China, there are a number of issues that must be considered in order to establish and operate manufacturing plant in...

We are often asked what finish is possible for the aluminium extrusions when anodized. The short answer is that it is much easier if designer of the extruded part specify desired finish and manufacturer will try to match it as close as possible.  Speaking colour wise, when anodizing aluminium part almost any colour is possible. In some instances even shades of a colour can be achieved. Most common is Clear Anodizing. Clear anodizing builds a clear anodic layer over the surface of aluminum to protect it, while allowing the natural beauty of the aluminum to shine through. It’s most inexpensive method of...

Plastic fade under the sunlight (UV light) is a common issue in appliances exposed to the elements. It’s been battled for years and chemical additives have been developed to aid this issue. Image to the left represents two injection moulding plastic samples. Bottom blue part was stored away from sunlight, top sample is the same material but was subject to the sunlight for 36 months. Sample contained maximum amount of UV stabiliser. After some experimenting, is was found that two reliable colours can be used for injection moulded parts that exposed to prolonged UV light: Black and Silver. One would think, that black...