Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

27 Jul

What is Graphite?

We’ve written a lot in this blog about our primary material, graphite. We want to clarify that when we talk about graphite in most industrial applications, we are discussing synthetic graphite. Synthetic graphite is the crystalline form of carbon. It is a man-made material that is extremely resistant to high temperatures and acidic or basic solutions. Graphite can be engineered to obtain specific properties such as density, electrical resistance, hardness, porosity, compressive strength, flexural strength, coefficient of thermal expansion, and thermal conductivity. Below, we will detail the processes that go into making synthetic graphite and the different forms it can...

23 Jun

Carbon Fiber Composite Materials in Vacuum Furnaces

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We’ve never bought into that adage, especially since many of us have parents or grandparents who have taken up new hobbies like gardening or bird watching with vigor. As a business, Semco also rejects the logic of the adage. Yes, we have been around for several decades, and our core business remains machining graphite materials. We did not become industry leaders by shunning innovation, though, and as we have grown as a company specializing in producing graphite components, the materials industry has devised new graphite composite materials, as well as...

16 Jun

Graphite Oxidation

As we have explained in this blog before, synthetic graphite (man-made graphite) is produced in hundreds of different graphite grades. Most of these graphite grades have been developed for specific applications, and each grade has its own set of properties associated with it. At Semco, we make it our business to be experts on synthetic graphite and the myrian properties of different graphite grades. We pass this expertise onto our clients so that they can choose the appropriate material for their application. With their extensive knowledge of these synthetic materials, our engineers can help clients solve very complicated issues, as...

21 May

Graphite Market Growth After COVID

The news is not a place to look for good news, at least not over the last month. Under the nightmarish headlines about what the virus is doing to people and communities are other frightening headlines about what it’s doing to the economy. In the current environment, with businesses idled and unemployment on a steep trajectory, it is hard to imagine growth in industrial output in anyone’s economic outlook for the short to mid-term. We at Semco, like all other businesses small and large, have watched with concern as events have unfolded. Would this downturn affect the market for graphite...

12 May

Measures to Ensure Air Quality and Social Distancing

A little secret that we know at Semco is that machining graphite is both an art and a science. Graphite machining is a nuanced, complex process that involves collaboration between the client, our engineers and shop floor employees, and our state-of-the-art machines. As much as we thought we had our graphite machining down to a science, the coronavirus has caused us to take stock of and recalibrate some basic aspects of how we run our shop. We produce graphite components for several critical industries, thus we began working under two imperatives during this pandemic: keep up our production and, most...