Aubert & Duval

Products:

• Aubert & Duval is a key company for the design and development of high-performance materials with specific characteristics.
• In the aeronautics, energy, defense, transportation, specialties and tooling markets, Aubert & Duval has been participating in its customers' projects for over a century by designing and developing cutting-edge metallurgical solutions.
• We design, develop and transform materials to offer high-performance metallurgical solutions in the form of bars, powders, billets, forged products, stamped products, rolled bars in high-performance steels, superalloys, aluminum and titanium alloys.

Conception

• Thanks to the world-renowned expertise of our metallurgists, we design new grades to meet the challenges of tomorrow and continue to optimize our standard grades to offer a competitive range to our customers.
• Our production processes are developed and optimized to ensure their reliability and repeatability, while remaining the most competitive for our customers.

Steel making

• In order to give the materials the right characteristics for your applications, the development phase is based on air or vacuum processes in primary production or in remelted mode for special steels, superalloys and titanium.

Transformation

• Our steel grades are further processed in our factories by atomization, rolling, forging or die-stamping.
• Our factories have high-performance industrial tools to manufacture powders for additive manufacturing, forged or stamped parts, bars for cutting-edge industries.
• Aubert & Duval also offers servicesmachining and heat treatment.

Innovation

• Our product and process innovation policy, our R&D department and the support of a global network of experts (customers, universities, research laboratories) are all assets that give Aubert & Duval the ability to design innovative metallurgical solutions to meet the specific needs of your projects. Our research centers and our experts have also developed a real expertise in modeling to make your development cycles shorter and more reliable.
• Manufacturing processes (e.g. pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, electrometallurgy, cast iron steelmaking, electric steelmaking, metal refining, Waelz recycling, etc.):
• Aubert & Duval has strong expertise in the development of metal alloys and meets the highest requirements of the industries it serves.
• The production of high-performance steels and superalloys involves producing an alloy of perfectly controlled composition by melting in an electric furnace from recycled alloy scraps and alloying elements.

Several types of processes are used depending on the characteristics targeted:

For the production of metals: 

• Air steel making, carried out with an arc furnace and followed by a metallurgical treatment phase (addition of alloy metals) to achieve the desired chemical analysis and purity;
• Vacuum steel making, carried out for alloys supporting higher constraints (and containing alloying elements reactive to oxygen and nitrogen). It is carried out in vacuum induction furnaces of the VIM (Vacuum Induction Melting) type;
• Remelting, necessary for critical parts intended for the aeronautics, energy production and tooling sectors. The remelting operation is carried out under slag (ESR furnace, Electro Slag Remelting) or under vacuum (VAR, Vacuum Arc Remelting). For certain types of alloys for aeronautics and land turbines, the two treatments are carried out successively.
• The development of titanium alloys by PAM-CHR (cold crucible plasma arc fusion);
• Powder metallurgy: After melting the metal in a furnace, this process consists of atomizing a jet of liquid metal in the form of fine droplets which, when cooling, form a powder. These metal powders produced by gas atomization can then be compacted into a perfectly dense material by hot isostatic compaction. This process is particularly suitable for very highly alloyed grades with very high mechanical characteristics, such as high-speed steels.

Aubert & Duval has also developed strong skills in the atomization of free powders intended primarily for additive manufacturing (3D printing).

Finally, Aubert & Duval is a shareholder of EcoTitanium, with ADEME and Crédit Agricole Centre France. Eco Titanium produces aeronautical-grade titanium ingots from recycled scrap, using PAM/VAR technology, one of the characteristics of which is to maximize the recycling rate.

For metal processing:

After processing, different techniques are used to shape the material by mechanical means, generally hot, and to optimize the mechanical characteristics of the material.

• The matrixing:

Aubert & Duval is a world-leading die maker specializing in large parts for critical applications and whose quality of design, development and manufacturing require exceptional metallurgical expertise, know-how and equipment. Aubert & Duval's processes meet the specifications of the most demanding industries in terms of rigor, reproducibility and quality. It is one of the only producers to forge all four types of materials: steel, superalloys, aluminum and titanium. The steel and some of the superalloys are partly developed in-house. Forging is carried out at the Issoire, Interforge and Pamiers sites.

The Die-forging division includes die-forging presses from 4,5 kt to 65 kt, drumsticks from 1 to 16 tons and various finishing (grinding), heat treatment, non-destructive testing and machining (lathes, milling machines) installations.

The activity of the Interforge company, located in Issoire, has developed since the mid-1980s. 1970 around a press of 65 000 tons, the most powerful in the Western world. This press constitutes a strategic asset of the first order. Its capacity allows it to manufacture parts that are difficult to produce with competing presses, limited to 40 000/45 000 tons.

The Pamiers factory is organized around two presses: 22000 tons and 40000 tons. The latter is fully integrated and has a tool designed specifically for the die-forging of aircraft engine parts, particularly large ones. A new press 6000 tons is currently being installed in Pamiers.

• Open forging consists of shaping bars or blanks of simple shape. This operation is carried out hot under a press, a forging machine or a ram, by a sequence of successive presses without using dies.
• Rolling is carried out by a series of passes between cylinders to shape the material into sheets, bars (typically 20 to 200 mm in diameter) or wire (5 to 20 mm in diameter).

Aubert & Duval is the sole shareholder of UKAD, a site located in Les Ancizes, which has a free-standing forging press 4500 tons, intended for the production of titanium billets and bars.

Finally, Aubert & Duval has two presses of 1500 tons and 10000 tonnes in India, as part of a joint venture created with Aequs (India).

• the metals concerned: steel, copper, zinc, nickel, lithium, manganese, cobalt, titanium, indium, rare earths, tin, lead, etc.

Aubert & Duval develops its metallurgical activities upstream of strategic industries, notably aeronautics, energy and defense. The products marketed by A&D are manufactured from high-tech steels and alloys.

Aubert & Duval is present across the entire metallurgy value chain: production, forging and then stamping.

Aubert & Duval produces the following parts:

• Special steel parts: 35%
• Superalloy parts: 30%
• Titanium parts: 20%
• Aluminum parts: 15%

targeted downstream markets:

• Aeronautics
• Energy
• Defense
• Medical