Advanced Materials
Bühler’s Advanced Materials business is unique in every respect. Whether it’s producing homogeneous battery slurry, coatings in the nano range, or megacasting for ultra-large car body structural parts, the technologies are essential for the production of many of the conveniences of our modern life. Thriving rather than merely surviving in fast-paced markets, demands foresight. That’s why Bühler is committed to recognizing and driving major trends at an early stage.
Lukas Hofstetter, November 2024
What is the driving factor behind Bühler’s Advanced Materials business? Sometimes it is quite literal − for example, the fields of die casting, coating, and mixing technologies are driven by the automotive industry; sometimes it is more metaphorical, such as in the fields of applications for smartphones and printing ink. Wherever you look in Bühler’s Advanced Materials business, it is teeming with high-tech applications that support our customers’ vital process steps.
All of these technologies are finely tuned to the specific and diverse needs of the individual markets they serve. “We offer key technologies in our customers’ process chains, and at these interfaces we understand exactly how our technology must function within the bigger picture,” explains Marcel Natterer, who has been CEO Advanced Materials at Bühler since the beginning of 2023. “We have to know every detail of the process chains. This comprehensive understanding helps us to identify and correctly assess market trends. Keeping all of this in mind while excelling at each individual step − that’s what gives our Advanced Materials business its edge.”
A classic example of this is die casting. One in four vehicles worldwide contains parts that were manufactured using Bühler die casting technology. In other words, one billion people travel in vehicles whose parts were produced using Bühler technologies. Anyone who can achieve such a market share must be more than a traditional supplier, they must constantly be preparing for the road ahead.
“Our experts recognized many years ago that the automotive industry was facing its biggest transformation since the invention of the combustion engine: electromobility. In the midst of a bear market in the late 2010s, we took decisive action. We rolled up our sleeves and invested heavily in research and development. With the megacasting technologies of our Carat die casting machine series, we found the answer to how cars can be manufactured most efficiently, in collaboration with our stakeholders,” says Samuel Schär, who was CEO Advanced Materials at Bühler from 2013 to 2022 and is now Chief Services and Sales Officer for the company.
Keeping the entire chain in view, but maximizing the strength of each individual step is what makes advanced materials so exciting.
Marcel Natterer,
CEO Advanced Materials at Bühler
Today, Carat technologies are indispensable. With clamping forces of up to 92,000 kilonewtons, ultra-large car body structural parts can be produced in a single shot, saving dozens of work steps. With megacasting solutions, the die casting business has not only designed the nail itself, it also has hit it on the head with precision. Now, the team is researching the next step in aluminum die casting – rheocasting.
“In die casting, liquid aluminum is forced into a die in a relatively short time. The aluminum cools quickly. With parts getting bigger and bigger, we are aiming for a mixture that flows for as long as possible. In addition, this melt should be as dense as possible to reduce porosity to an absolute minimum,” explains Schär. “This is what we want to achieve with rheocasting technology, which involves producing a mixture of liquid aluminum and individual solid components. Put simply, the melt achieves the consistency of ice cream, which means it can be spread into the mold, perfectly filling every crack and preventing a ‘skin’ from forming during cooling.”
This next quantum leap in die casting is already showing promising results in the laboratory and now Bühler’s experts are testing the technology on an industrial scale to get it off the ground.
In the high-tech sector, it is often the invisible technologies that make our modern life easier in terms of networking, efficiency, and overall convenience. While die casting solutions shoot molten aluminum into a die under high pressure and compress it with a weight equivalent to the Eiffel Tower, the systems from Bühler Leybold Optics work in the range of tenths of nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and a tenth of that is called an angstrom – a unit that is beyond the grasp of the human mind because it is on the scale of individual atoms, where the building blocks of matter exist.
“In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), our technologies are in high demand for coating the machines on which contract manufacturers produce the most powerful chips for the world’s leading software companies,” says Natterer. Leybold Optics in Alzenau, Germany, offers an extensive selection of advanced technologies. “In precision optics, we deliver a diverse range of solutions and applications. For example, lithography in the ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet range is fundamental to the semiconductor industry. As designs become more sophisticated, we must develop our technologies accordingly, to meet the demands of more complex structures and geometries. We are also researching atomic layer deposition technology, which represents the next level in thin film coating,” explains Natterer.
Even if AI chips dominate the headlines, the semiconductor field is extremely broad-based. In the precision optics business area, Leybold Optics also offers solutions for 3D antennas in the field of radar systems, WiFi and Bluetooth, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality. These are all exciting developments with incredible potential. How-ever, they are also business areas in which only those who are always one step ahead and actively develop technologies get a piece of the pie.
“It is important to always look at the market as a whole and not to be influenced by regional or market-specific developments. Take LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, for example. It is related to radar, but works with light beams instead of radio waves, and is crucial for self-driving cars. We are at the forefront here with our Helios technology. Even though self-driving cars are only slowly starting to appear on the roads in Europe, for example, they are already part of the cityscape in places like San Francisco,” explains Schär. Figures from the provider Waymo confirm this. According to Reuters, the subsidiary of the Alphabet Group, which also includes Google and YouTube, the number of trips has doubled to 100,000 per week in just three months. The third business area, Grinding & Dispersing, also benefits from strong growth in e-mobility. Even if the boom has slowed somewhat in regions such as Europe and North America, steady growth continues.
China is setting the pace, with an electric car share of around 40 percent, and the trend is rising sharply.
Marcel Natterer,
CEO Advanced Materials at Bühler
Our Grinding & Dispersing business area has been able to establish a strong position here for several years with our continuous mixing technology for battery slurry,” Natterer explains. “Today, 70 percent of batteries for electric cars are manufactured in China. Accordingly, western car manufacturers and suppliers are now moving and building up this expertise in house. We are happy to support them in this endeavor with our experience and – again – our capabilities to test new applications in the lab and scale them up to industrial levels.”
A new technology that could give electric cars in Europe and North America an even greater boost is the solid-state battery. “In a solid-state battery, a solid electrolyte is used instead of a liquid one, which is responsible for transporting the ions between the anode and the cathode. If this is solid, manufacturers can make the batteries more compact and with no flammable components, which significantly increases safety. In addition, much higher energy densities can be achieved, which reduces charging times and increases range – we are talking about a range of up to 1,000 kilometers after a few minutes of charging,” says Natterer. This could be a real game-changer in the automotive industry and further proof that innovation and collaboration are the keys to a more sustainable future. “We are carrying out intensive research with our network in this area and can contribute our in-depth know-how – whether in our own application centers, in exchange with university research centers, or in direct collaboration with our customers,” says Natterer.
It is important to always look at the market as a whole and not to be influenced by regional or market-specific developments.
Samuel Schär,
Chief Services and Sales Officer at Bühler
In all these highly complex applications, the top priority for Bühler’s Advanced Materials business is always to reconcile sustainability and cost effectiveness. “Every innovation must reduce the footprint in production. In die casting, megacasting enables manufacturers to replace 100 to 200 individual parts, resulting in massive savings in material and downstream steps such as transport or welding.
The continuous mixing process used in the production of battery slurry saves up to 80 percent of the energy used in the conventional batch process and greatly reduces operating costs. And in the coatings segment, intelligent glass coatings reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling by up to 35 percent,” says Schär.
These examples illustrate why the innovative force of advanced materials is fundamental to our modern lifestyle, but also to the sustainable change that new technologies can spark. “With our highly qualified employees, our global network of Application & Training Centers, and our partnerships with customers, we have incredible leverage for positive change,” says Natterer. “We all want to make the world a better place through science and technology. That is the essence of our Advanced Materials business. It makes us very confident about the future.”
The essence of Bühler’s Advanced Materials business is recognizing technology cycles and applying core technological expertise to an ever-growing range of new applications. Exciting overlaps with technologies from the Grains & Food business unit are constantly emerging. For example, the twin-screw extruder technology used to produce the electrode masses for lithium-ion batteries is the same as that used to process breakfast cereals, vegetable proteins, and fish food.
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