Custom Carbon and Graphite Machining Blog

17 May

Graphite: A Self-Lubricating Material

When people think about graphite applications, what usually comes to mind (well, besides pencils, which everyone knows about) are crucibles or other graphite components used in high-heat environments. Graphite’s heat tolerance is a well-known quality of this wonder material. But among the most common graphite applications in industry is the use of graphite as a lubricant. Lubrication in mechanical systems is essential to the proper operation of the system. Mechanical systems that are composed of components designed to interact with each other, through friction, will have to take into account possible issues such as heat build-up and wear. Designing proper...

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...

27 Apr

Program Addressing Graphite Manufacturing Consistency

Anyone citrus fan who also happens to work in graphite engineering knows there is more than one way to peel an orange, just as there is more than one way to reverse-engineer or fabricate a graphite component for a customer. These days, all CNC milling machines use software and programming to machine the custom shapes associated with custom parts. Our CAD Department uses CAD Models (Solid Models) to extract the needed features of a custom part in order to create programs necessary to machine that part. One would assume that such a system would guarantee consistency each time we run...

12 Apr

Continuous Casting in Graphite Materials

When people ask us at Semco what is so special about graphite, we usually describe the amazing versatility of graphite materials. The applications that are optimized by using graphite materials are only limited by the imaginations of engineers. One such application, of both ISO-molded and extruded graphite, is a casting method called continuous casting. This casting method is used in high volume production of metals with a constant cross-section. The method uses an open ended graphite die which is surrounded by a copper jacket through which molten metal is poured. The graphite mold is typically water cooled. This cooling method...

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...