VŠB and HIP

So my dream came true, I finally saw our one and only HIP for science and research. It is located at the workplace of the Faculty of Materials and Technology, Department of Materials and Technologies for Automobiles in Ostrava, and is under the supervision of doc. Ing. Kateřina Skotnicová, Ph.D. and Ing. Tomáš Čegan, Ph.D.

It is from the Belgian company EPSI and looks like this. It has two job positions; one is for CIP – pictured in the front – and one is for HIP – pictured in the back. So, both cold and hot isostatic pressing can be tested here.

But the HIP part is more important for our purposes. It has a working chamber of approximately dia 100×300 mm, an overpressure of up to 200 MPa and a maximum temperature of 1450 C. Perfect for testing samples, less so for practical applications.

If the gas cabinet is opened, there are surprisingly few elements in it, so it does not differ much from other gas installations. Its heart is a high-pressure compressor, which allows working with argon pressures of up to 200 MPa, i.e. 2000 bar. Since it is a small working chamber, the rotary vacuum pump is not abnormally large.

And since it is a collaboration within the National Centre of Competence together with Galvamet, we can only look forward to interesting results of collaboration in the development of some applications in the field of additive manufacturing.

January 17, 2023

Jiří Stanislav