January 28, 2020 – Hartford, WI – Hartford Police are putting out a notification about an explosion welding process that will be conducted later this week. Below is the notice.
BLASTING NOTIFICATION
This is to give notice that on Thursday, January 30 and Friday, January 31 American Exchanger Services, 709 W. Wisconsin Street, in Hartford plans on blasting during the conditionally-approved hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.
If necessary, the company will complete the blasting process on Monday, February 3.
American Exchanger Services has requested a total of 16 blasts over the two or three-day period, with approximately one hour between blasts.
If you’re wondering what is involved in explosion welding a video is below followed by an explanation on High Energy Rate Fabrication.
High Energy Rate Fabrication
The use of High Energy Rate Fabrication (HERF) allows design engineers a level of flexibility in design unattainable by other forming technologies. HERF provides minimal change in material properties, reduced yield strength, and greater complexity.
American Exchanger Services is uniquely equipped and experienced to perform projects involving HERF. For this reason, Scientists from the University of Wisconsin Madison came to AM-EX with a drawing of a new concept in fusion reactor design. This design was a helically symmetric stellerator, which required a highly irregular structure for the vacuum chamber. This design greatly simplifies the operation of the plasma while greatly increasing the fabrication complexity of the reactor. AM-EX was able to work with the scientists to explosively form this extreme shape to very tight tolerances. With operating temperatures in excess of 8 million ºF, this was truly an amazing project for American Exchanger Services to be involved in.
Explosive welding allows for the greatest possible level of tubejoint integrity. It allows the joining of almost any combination of metals and alloys for tubes and tubesheets. The technology involves the impacting of the tube into the tubehole at such high energy rates that the atoms share their electrons across the interface, thus bonding the materials.