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Umicore sets new standards with its innovative silver brazing alloy BlueBraze: less silver – more brazing

Regional website Germany

Essen, 16 September. Umicore Technical Materials business line BrazeTec today launched BlueBraze at the International Trade Fair Joining Cutting Surfacing in Essen.

Unlike conventional brazing alloys, BlueBraze has a 10 % lower proportion of silver. This provides significant cost and environmental benefits. At the same time, Umicore’s engineers ensured that the quality and properties of this new product remained at the same high level as conventional alloys.

It is the first time that a brazing alloy manufacturer has managed to reduce the level of silver significantly and at the same time been able to maintain all existing properties.

Dr. Hartmut Schmoor, Head of BrazeTec, explains: “Markets have been demanding a reduced proportion of silver in brazing alloys for a long time in order to save costs. As a leading supplier of brazing alloys we acted on our customers’ demands and market requirements and developed this truly innovative and sustainable product – the result of our work is BlueBraze, a brazing alloy product line with a reduced proportion of silver and the same technical properties.”

BlueBraze is a silver brazing alloy with excellent flow characteristics and a low melting point. It is suitable for any steel, copper and copper alloys, nickel and nickel alloys and can be applied to any brazing process as well as to induction heating. The special feature: its silver content is drastically reduced – 10 % by weight compared to an equivalent product. However, BlueBraze offers the same properties and conforms to RoHS and REACH.

For customers using BlueBraze the product offers various advantages, such as a significant cost reduction through the reduced silver content and more rods per kilogram due to a lower density of substitute metals. Additionally, BrazeTec’s innovative brazing alloy offers more planning certainty as a result of reduced customer exposure to silver price fluctuations. BlueBraze is also sustainable – BrazeTec sources a large part of silver for brazing alloys from its in-house precious metals recycling. By both reducing the proportion of silver in BlueBraze alloys and using recycled sources BrazeTec is helping save precious resources.

Note to editors

The new BlueBraze alloys replace the brazing alloys BrazeTec 4576 and 3476 and are available as wire and rod (diameter 1,5mm and 2mm). They can be purchased now and are available for delivery immediately. BlueBraze alloys are suitable for the use in the HVACR industry (heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration). There they can be applied, for instance, in the production of stationary and mobile air conditioning systems as well as refrigerators, freezers or compressors. Of course BlueBraze alloys can also be applied in all industries that already use the brazing alloys BrazeTec 4576 and 3476.