Nickel alloys

Lipmann Walton is known for its specialism in Rhenium metal for super alloy since the early 1990s. 

It was this involvement which in the early 2000’s led us to source rhenium-bearing nickel-base super alloy scrap coming out of the Aerospace and IGT industries and the chemical extraction of rhenium from such alloys. While this was a profitable business when Rhenium prices reached very high levels of price ($12,500 per kg in 2008), lower prices for rhenium have placed greater emphasis on ‘revert’ than expensive ‘recycling’. Revert as distinct from recycling, involves the cleaning/ removal of ceramics via the acid-leaching of spent superalloy in order to produce a clean vacuum grade material for re-melting.

Our present work in this field has widened to the acquisition of turbine blades and other castings in a number of other non-rhenium bearing grades, which are collected and cleaned-up before being returned to melters for adding as a proportion of revert to virgin super alloy melts.  During the last 10 years or so, our trade in nickel-base super alloy scrap has developed into one of our core businesses.

While therefore our long-term experience lies in second and third generation single crystal alloys used in aerospace and IGT, with Rhenium contents on average between 3-6% providing high strength and high thermal creep resistance, such as Rene N5, Rene N515, PWA-1484, CMSX-4, we are now deeply involved with many other non-Rhenium bearing alloys, such as IN939, GTD111, GTD222, MGA1400, MGA2400, to name but a few.  Lipmann Walton works with independent partners to ensure that all scrap is processed to a high standard and is independently tested to ensure conformity to our customers’ demands.

We are also involved with Cobalt-base alloys generated from the medical, aerospace and IGT industries and are regularly stocking FSX-414 and similar alloys.  Our expansion into cobalt-base alloy scrap was borne out of our experience of over 10 years in Ni-alloy scrap.