VELCO celebrates 50 years
For 50 years VELCO GmbH/Germany has been building a solid reputation as a reliable partner of the foundry, steel and refractory industries.
The company was established in 1971 by Kurt Wolf, father of today’s owner Christian Wolf, in the city of Velbert located at the border of the Ruhr industrial area. Velbert was once an important centre of the foundry industry. Velco’s first Rotamat rotor gunning machine was launched in this year and is still manufactured there today. There are almost 1,300 in use around the world. The Rotamat is small and flexible and can be used for many types of repair in the steel, cement and construction industries.
Over the decades VELCO improved and broadened its machines, respecting industry’s demand for cost savings, improved efficiencies and rising safety. Besides the rotor gunning machine, VELCO’s delivery program now comprises pressure vessel gunning machines and gunning robots for the refractory repair of the different aggregates. These installations allow the automatic repair of furnaces and other aggregates in hot conditions, saving costs for re-heating, refractory material and manpower and improving worker safety.
Based on its know-how of this machinery and its use in steel plants, VELCO has built up a second business line: the pneumatic transport of dry bulk materials. In steel plants this is mainly the injection of carbon or lime for slag foaming in the EAF. Other areas are secondary metallurgy or the injection into the blast furnace. Project highlights are a pneumatic transport line of 1000 m distance and approvals for different ATEX zones.
The lowest achieved feed rate for an application was 20 g/h and the highest was up to 500 kg/min. As environmental demands became more important, VELCO used its know-how for developing equipment for the pneumatic transport of filter dusts and other residues for injection into furnaces. By injecting the filter dust into the EAF the total filter dust amount will be reduced as a part of the dust is converted into slag. The Zn content vaporizes and is transferred to the next melt. Hence Customers can reduce their costs for waste deposit, by reducing the total amount of dust and producing a more valuable filter dust with higher Zn share.
VELCO has been headquarted in Velbert for over half a century and developments are continuing in terms of improving dry gunning in respect of quality and dust creation as well as implementing industry 4.0 technologies to its machinery. A remote access module which allows for worldwide connection using only a smartphone is available for all machines and can access data such as operation hours, flow rates, water pressure, operational conditions, fault messages and even the location of the machine.
For further information, log on to www.velco.de