Next week CuproBraze Alliance will have it’s annual Members Meeting, this time hosted by Umicore BrazeTec in Hanau, Germany, so it is time to summarize what is going on. Note, that there is possibility for everyone to attend the Open House at BrazeTec, see more information on the Upcoming Events page.

The first months of the year have started well for CuproBraze. Three new companies have purchased process machinery for CuproBraze and are preparing production start-up during this year. There will be more coming next year. Aurubis has taken over the CuproBraze copper and brass material production and is intensifying it’s presence in the marketplace. Next year it will concentrate the CuproBraze material production to Zutphen plant in The Netherlands. All these activities mean that the availability of CuproBraze heat exchangers around the world will increase during this and next year.

If I would have to describe year 2011 with only one word, I would choose the word ‘ambivalent’. In psychology, ambivalence means a kind of experience where the positive and negative aspects of a subject are both present in a person’s mind at the same time. For me, the positive side has been that social media has shown it’s political capability as a driving force towards equality, by the end of certain dictatorships and autocracies. The development of the Internet since early 1990s has resulted a situation when there are no leaders who are unconstrained – every leader has to deal in some way with group to which they are accountable. Instead of a traditional approach where a small group of strong leaders define structure, laws and control system for a larger group of people, local scale interaction has taken an unpredictable population wide patterns, which are affecting the politics, power positions and every day life in a country and/or in global scale. Since the rise of the Internet the world’s networked population has grown from millions to billions and as the communications landscape gets wider, more complex, and more interactive, the networked population is gaining greater access to information. This means that there are far more opportunities to engage in public conversation and an enhanced ability to undertake collective actions.

Another, not so positive side of the coin, is the current dynamics of the world economy. Especially the financial crisis in Europe and US has affected the development of economies by cutting down the industrial production and service sector, and increasing debts and unemployment rates. During last decades, banks, GSEs, other financial institutions and governments have been developing welfare and growth in a way which has not been economically sustainable. In the financial sector, higher profit margins have been aimed by increasing the risk and deregulating the debt-to-equity ratio. In public sector growth has been enabled by increasing consumption financed by growing national debt. Now we’re living times when politicians and corporate leaders have to reconsider the values and rationality behind the ideology of free and deregulated capitalism. With the help of recent developments in the fields of neuropsychology- and -economy, we have gained lots of insights in how do people behave and how the brain functions in the decision making process, especially in a situation which contains risk and uncertainty. It has been shown that mainstream economics based on rational agents, is incomplete and fails to explain certain type of behaviour. I wish that these findings will be utilized when re-designing the collaboration between markets and governments. Let’s hope that 2012 will bring the upward spiral with the help of more sustainable ideologies and deeper co-operation between the western world and major emerging-market countries.

We at CuproBraze Alliance are looking forward to a continued and mutual cooperation also in 2012 and the years beyond. We wish you, your family a Healthy and Prosperous New Year 2012!

Warm regards from Asia-Pasific’s International Mining Exhibition. Now that the show is over it’s time to summarize the key outputs of last week. First of all, with more than 22 000 m2 of exhibition space and over 600 exhibitors AIMEX was an impressive show and certainly has it’s place among the largest mining exhibitions in the world. Despite deepening Eurozone crisis and continuing uncertainty over United States economy it was a great pleasure to see the amount of enthusiasm and “can do spirit” which was among the exhibitors and visitors at the Sydney Showground. Thanks to Australian resources industry, the country has been able to fight the Global Financial Crisis which is now strongly reflected in the value of the local currency – Aussie. Please forgive me, but as an old school type of economist I can not help myself being satisfied to see the benefits when country’s economy has a solid background in theresources industry (thanks to hard working drillers and diggers), instead of the dominating finance sector.

Exhibition had lots of news and technology to offer. Caterpillar’s Bucyrus buy, finalized just pre-show, was seen as an important step which will generate wealth and benefits for the companies, CAT’s distributors and end-customers. Technology development-wise, driverless vehicle and equipment strategy, where for instance haul trucks are computer controlled was one of the big topics at the show. With the help of sophisticated IC -technology, the fleet-owners and OEM’s have a chance to increase the real-time visibility of the key parametres, which enables a more accurate predictive maintenance, higher productivity and operator security.

Finally, let’s get to real deal – heat exchangers used in on- and underground mining vehicles. First of all, the Australian market has a lots of special characteristics which have to be well studied and understood before implementing non-value adding technical solutions to the market. We talked to numerous operators, fleet-owners, service managers, technical managers and their consensus of opinion was that long service distances, ambitious productivity targets, extreme ambient temperatures combined with challenging terrains favour copper-brass based radiators, charge-air-coolers and oil coolers. I was glad to see that more than 90% of the heat exchangers seen at the show where based on copper alloys. For me this is a clear message that the technology is evolving naturally to reflect local environmental and operational requirements.

Nevertheless, most of the products seen at the show where still soft-soldered, so there’s a great chance for almost factor 3 improvement in the joint strengths while moving from soft-soldering to brazing. Besides CuproBraze Alliance, there where companies already introducing CuproBraze product portfolio to the market. So, if you demand robust structures which can withstand the vibrations, heatload and allow operator friendly field-maintenance – it’s time to turn to CuproBraze technology.

Finally, on behalf of CuproBraze Alliance, we want to express our thanks to Reed Mining Events for organizing such a great show, and our visitors for their visits to our booth!

Vacuumschmelze has been acquired by OMG – Read more…

Luvata Rolled Products Division has been acquired by Aurubis. Read more …

CuproBraze Alliance will have a booth on AIMEX (http://www.aimex.com.au/) on September 6 to 9. Held once every four years and firmly established on the international mining industry calendar, AIMEX is the flagship event within the portfolio of established industrial trade fairs in Australia. AIMEX is located at the Sydney Showground inside Sydney Olympic Park at Homebush, only 20 minutes from the CBD (Sydney Business District). Sydney Olympic Park is a world class venue with excellent facilities.

AIMEX is where Australian and international suppliers of mining technology, equipment and services come together with mining industry buyers and specifiers from throughout the Asia-Pacific region to explore mutually beneficial business opportunities, exchange technical information and network in an interactive business environment. This year there will be more than 600 exhibitors. AIMEX is a trade business event and is not open to the general public.

CuproBraze booth number is SP 178. It will be manned by experts from several Alliance member companies. Utilize the opportunity to see and feel real CuproBraze heat exchangers, find a supplier and put questions to the experts of the technology. CuproBraze heat exchangers are already in limited use in heavy duty construction equipment in Australia. We hope and expect that this exhibition will contribute to more widespread use in Australia and other areas.

Alliance had Board Meetings and Members Meeting in Jyväskylä, Finland, on May 16 to 17. The meetings were organized by Finnradiator and the attendees also had an opportunity to visit Finnradiator’s CuproBraze production plant in nearby city Suolahti. Many thanks to Finnradiator for the excellent arrangements!

The Members Meeting approved Board’s proposal to allow heat exchanger manufacturers to become global members at fee that is equal to current local membership fee. The reason is to attract more heat exchanger manufacturers as members. They now will have the possibility to market themselves globally through Alliance at a very reasonable cost level.

The next big marketing opportunity is AIMEX mining expo in Sydney in September. See more at Resources/Upcoming Events.

I just returned from 1.5 week’s visit to Poland. The primary motive for 2000 km and 9 b-to-b meetings was to discuss with the representatives of local military-, mining- and construction industries on how they see the prospects for different materials in heat exchangers now and in the near future.

Even though local agriculture sector has extensively turned into brazed aluminium radiators, intercoolers and oil coolers, more robust heavy-duty sector is still gearing with copper-brass coolers, strongly. These OEMs are aware of the intense environment where their products are being used. Heat exchanger systems are exposed to unclean cooling liquid, harsh and corrosive operational environment and human factors.

What do I mean by that? Increasing productivity objectives combined with the lack of proper maintenance tools and conditions force OEMs to use extremely high safety factors at product design stage. When it comes to heat exchangers, CuproBraze alloys have been tested and approved to tolerate even hardest operational and environmental conditions. A good option with CuproBraze is to start from the aftermarket, by offering customers CuproBraze alternative to let them see by themselves what added-value a more reliable heat exchanger system has to their business.

Despite continued uncertainty in the U.S construction segment and in the overall economy, CONEXPO-CON/AGG attracted nearby 120 000 registered visitors. International registrants accounted for a record of 24 percent of the total, representing more than 150 countries. For CuproBraze Alliance, it was a great opportunity to see that even though the last years have been difficult, global construction industry is already looking into the future with reliant and positive prospects.

During the show, we witnessed a vast amount of new developments, in the areas like advanced diesel engines, RFID technology utilization in vehicle safety systems, and many other in vehicle, component and service businesses.

The message from CuproBraze Alliance to the visitors of our booth was to show the ways brazed copper-brass technology can support OEM’s, radiator repair shops and truck fleet owners both to higher productivity and to increased lifespan. Our visitors were very positive to what they saw and many of them already had discovered how CuproBraze technology could benefit them and their customers. On behalf of the CuproBraze Alliance, we would like to thank our visitors for their visits to our booth!

Now it is clear that Alliance will have a booth at CONEXPO in Las Vegas, NV, USA, on March 22-26. CONEXPO-CON/AGG is the international gathering place in 2011 for the construction industries. Held every three years, the exposition showcases the latest equipment, products, services and technologies. Our booth is #10346 and located in South 1 indoor area, same area where many American truck company booths are placed. The booth will be manned by representatives of Alliance’s member companies like Finnradiator, Luvata, Seco/Warwick and Umicore BrazeTec. If you visit CONEXPO, utilize the opportunity to see the CuproBraze booth with heavy duty heat exchangers and to discuss with the experts.

The Board has decided two focus areas for this year’s marketing: To follow-up the leads from last year’s locomotive related activities, including Innotrans, and t focus on mining and construction equipment applications. The events for this year have been planned based on these guidelines. The Marketing Team has chosen Conexpo and AIMEX as the main events (see Upcoming Events for details). We are hoping to get booth space for both shows. We are also planning to attend a few smaller shows to give presentations without having booth.

The year has started with increasing interest in the technology. At least one new plant is under construction and will start production this year and a couple of more are close to the final decision. Some new developments and applications are also underway, indicating that we will have an intensive year after the recession time. We hope to be able to publish more on the activities during the next months.