Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

16 Jul

From Graphite Blocks to Graphite Component

We’ve covered many details in this blog about our machining of graphite components, including the different types of graphite that we use, design considerations, and some case studies about how we solved particular problems that our clients have run into. In this blog, we would like to provide a grand overview of the process that a block of graphite goes through in our facility to become finished graphite components ready to ship to our customers. More specifically, we want to tell you about the machines that do the cutting, shaping, and finishing of graphite blocks until they become the parts...

05 Jul

Graphite Material Property-Coefficient of Thermal Expansion

At Semco Carbon, we are constantly thinking of new, relevant, and useful topics involving graphite materials and graphite applications to share with the readers of this blog. If something has to do with the manufacture of graphite products, we’ve probably got a lot to say, and a story to tell, about it. During a recent meeting, our application engineers were working on a specific issue that one of our customers was having. This customer had been experiencing premature component breakage in a new high temperature process they were testing. After thinking about the specifics of their application, we realized that...

02 Jun

Metal Fabrication Requests

Every machining shop has its choice material. At Semco, that material is carbon graphite. We know the ins and outs of this material and can talk all day about isostatic vs. extruded graphite, or about graphite’s conductive and heat-resistant properties. While we are experts at graphite machining, we generally do not machine metal. Nevertheless, Semco Carbon occasionally receives metal fabrication RRF’s, projects we are not equipped to produce in house. Conversely (if you are a metal machining shop), your facility might receive graphite or carbon RFQ’s, projects that you are not equipped to produce. We would like to start a...

07 May

Graphite Density

For this blog post we are going to use the density of graphite as a tool to separate a wide variety of graphite materials. This will help us to categorize most of the graphite grades available today into three broad categories. Why? Because the graphite density is an important factor in determining suitability of a particular graphite grade for a particular application. How do we measure the density of graphite? Since density is a measure of mass in a certain volume, the test for bulk density requires samples of a known size. In our test we typically produce a group...

01 Apr

Flexural vs Compressive Strength in Graphite

It is an oddity of the graphite business, and in many other endeavors in life, that the more you know about something, the more you realize you still don’t know. At Semco, we do know there are many elements in graphite component design. We’ll go ahead and claim to know most of them (hey, decades in the same business can teach you a lot). But what we recognize is that when a client brings to us a problem with a graphite component that we machined, we may not immediately know what the problem is nor how to fix it. In fact, we’ve...