Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

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...

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...

30 Mar

The Tech Side of Graphite Fabrication

Your business is designing a manufacturing set-up. One of the constituent parts will be exposed to various chemicals and high heat. Graphite is considered for this part because it is chemically inert and stands up to extreme temperatures without degrading. Engineers make a mock-up of this manufacturing set-up and they Zoom call us at Semco. Customer: “Hi, we finished the mock-up of the apparatus and it looks like we’ll need a graphite mold about 7 or 8 inches long that looks kinda like this (holds up napkin drawing of future graphite component). Semco engineer: “That’s a nice drawing. Could you...

15 Mar

Lunch at Semco

Lunchtime with Graphite Engineers Here’s a riddle: what do graphite engineers talk about over lunch? Need another minute? Ok, we’ll give you the answer: graphite engineering! Well, that’s at least one of the answers. The most important part of that riddle is the fact that in a graphite shop, the employees enjoy their lunch together -- at least they do at Semco. Lunch at Semco is a time when the crew has a chance to enjoy a meal, discuss current shop projects, review the daily news, and swap family stories. While COVID has changed the dynamic in the lunchroom to...