A LEADER in a highly specialised steel product manufacturing field, Bisalloy Steels owes its success in the Australian mining industry to the benefits of local knowledge, along with the right combination of resilience and formability.
Established in 1980, Bisalloy Steels is Australia’s only manufacturer of high-tensile and abrasion-resistant quenched and tempered steel plate.
With its heritage firmly grounded in the critical mining and manufacturing sectors, the company also now provides its highly sort-after products to a range of markets including defence, energy, mineral processing, structural engineering, and transport.
Within the mining sector, the company’s BISALLOY Wear steel plates find use in a broad range of products, including demolition tools, ground engaging tools, earthmoving buckets, drag line buckets, wear plates, chutes, dump truck bodies, storage bins, and hoppers.
Specifically designed, hot rolled and heat treated to handle these demanding applications, BISALLOY Wear steel plates have been developed to maximise properties such as wear resistance, while also meeting the challenging workability and weldability requirements demanded by miners.
Five core products
BISALLOY Wear 320 steel offers the optimum combination of hardness, impact resistance and formability for wear applications requiring extensive forming/drilling or fabrication in abrasive applications, while BISALLOY Wear 400 steel has proven itself to be a highly versatile, through hardened, abrasion-resistant steel plate with the ability to withstand high impact and medium level abrasion applications.
BISALLOY Wear 450 steel, which is considered the ‘all-rounder’ of the range, has a nominal hardness of 450 HBW.
Combining well-balanced toughness with excellent formability and weldability, this product is recommended for heavy industrial tasks like dragline excavation and is also commonly used to manufacture dump truck bodies.
One of Bisalloy Steel’s first ever products, BISALLOY Wear 500 steel has been continually manufactured in Australia for more than 35 years.
Though a very high-hardness and abrasion resistant steel plate, it is also readily weldable and formable; and therefore, suitable for use in a range of applications.
The final product in the range – BISALLOY Wear 600 – was the most recent to be developed and introduced.
With a nominal hardness of 600HBW, it is extremely wear resistant and therefore recommended for liners in chutes and hoppers that need to carry high hardness rocks and minerals.
The Bisalloy advantage
Given the battering that mining equipment takes at the hands of earth, rocks and so forth, wear resistance is always a key measure when comparing the quality of steel plate products in this sector.
ASTM G65 is an American standard for abrasion test used to measure wear resistance of steel plate products.
As per ASTM G65, tests comparing the wearability of BISALLOY Wear steel and mild steel plates were carried out in independent laboratory.
The testing found that BISALLOY Wear 400 steel displayed 100pc improvement on wear compared to mild steel; BISALLOY Wear 500 steel experienced 200pc; and BISALLOY Wear 600 displayed 450pc improvement on wear as illustrated in the figure below.
Wear resistance isn’t the only consideration when comparing wear grade steel plate.
Other factors like weldability and formability are also important.
The wear resistance of steel is primarily determined by the amount of carbon and alloys it contains.
High carbon and alloy contents can enhance wear resistance but in the same time carbon equivalent of the steel will increase.
Because it requires a high pre-heating temperature during thermal cutting and welding, steel with a high carbon equivalent also tends to be difficult to work with.
Therefore, in the absence of the right research and development efforts, wear resistance tends to come at the cost of less workability.
The important thing to note here is that this trade off (between wear resistance and workability) is not necessarily directly proportionate.
Through careful product development, it is possible to develop products that achieve both characteristics.
This is precisely what Bisalloy has done.
Through its exacting research and testing efforts, the company has struck the right balance between durability and workability, and is therefore able to deliver the mining industry the wear grade steel plate products it needs.
Research and support
This success is no fluke – it comes down to two important factors.
It has been made possible by Bisalloy’s close collaboration with leaders in science, technology and steel manufacture on intensive research programs; and it involves knowledge of, and experience in, Australian industry.
By forming partnerships with local businesses, Bisalloy is able develop a deep understanding of their needs.
From there, it can customise value-added products and services to ensure their success.
The demands of high strength and high hardness steels and their subsequently stringent process routes have made it possible for Bisalloy to compete successfully in this highly specialised market.
Today, the company stands side-by-side with the some of the world’s largest and best-established engineering operations.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Because the company is local, and has all its resources right here in Australia, it can offer levels of development support that overseas competitors can’t hope to match.
Bisalloy’s collaborative approach and proximity to its Australian clients puts it in a good position to be able to handle engineering problems as they arise.
Combined with an understanding of local conditions and Australian business culture, this is a benefit that overseas competitors simply can’t replicate.
There is no substitute for resources on the ground, being on-hand (or at least close by) to deal with problems as they arise, and the creativity that well-functioning business relationships engender.
Over the years this, along with Bisalloy’s demonstrated commitment to the Australian mining sector, has made it possible for the company to achieve important incremental product improvements and meet the performance requirements of its customers.
