Industry | Manufacturing |
---|---|
Founded | 1916 [1] [2] |
Founder | Kuo-Ching Li |
Headquarters | Albany, Linn County, Oregon |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Kuo-Ching Li; Lynn D. Davis |
Revenue | US$$265 million (FY 2005) [3] |
Number of employees | 1,100 [4] |
Website | Official Website |
Wah Chang Corporation was an American manufacturing company in the metal or alloy industry based in Albany, Oregon in the United States. Since 2014, it has been a business unit of Allegheny Technologies and makes corrosion-resistant metals, such as hafnium, niobium, titanium, vanadium, and zirconium. [4]
In 1916 (some sources say 1914 [5] [6] ), Chinese American mining engineer Kuo-Ching "KC" Li Sr. [2] founded the company in New York state, under the name Wah Chang Trading Corporation. [5] Wah Chang is Cantonese for "fortunate enterprise" [6] or "great development". [7] This expanded as an international tungsten ore and concentrate trading company. [2]
In 1946, the company built a plant in Union City, New Jersey.
In the 1950s, it was also operating tungsten mines in Calento, Nevada, and near Bishop, California. [5]
In 1953, Stephen W. H. Yih, who had master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, was hired by Wah Chang Trading Corporation in New York to head up the Titanium Project.
In 1955, Kuo-Ching Li Sr., Founder of the Wah Chang Trading Corporation, New York, sent his top engineer, Stephen W. H. Yih to the US Bureau of Mines Titanium Development Plant in Boulder City NV [8] to learn how to make the metal. [4] This is where he met Wing Muin Mark, who was directing operations at the Titanium Development Plant. Within one year, Mark and Yih collaborated to produce the highest purity titanium in the world.
In 1956, the Energy Commission (AEC) contracted with Wah Chang to operate the U.S. Bureau of Mines zirconium plant in Albany, Oregon, to develop high-purity zirconium for use in the United States Navy's nuclear program. After Wah Chang was granted an additional two-year contract, it decided to build its own zirconium production facility. [4]
In May 1956, the Albany, Oregon-based Wah Chang Corporation hired Wing Muin Mark, as its second employee behind Yih. Mark was tasked with designing the plant and production equipment and supervising operations for the new Zirconium plant. Wah Chang began construction of its new plant in August. And on Christmas Day 1956, just four months later, the first commercially produced batch of Zirconium sponge was pulled from the reduction furnaces at the new production facility. Mark later developed the processes for making high-purity Hafnium and Titanium.
Li remained with the company until his death in 1961, serving as president until 1960 and then board chairman. [2]
Wah Chang was privately owned by K.C. Li until 1967, when it was acquired by Teledyne, [9] the main Albany plant (located in the then-unincorporated area known as Millersburg) becoming a subsidiary named Teledyne Wah Chang Albany, or TWCA. [10] In 1966, Wah Chang had around 1,200 employees, in plants in Albany, Oregon; Glen Cove, New York; Huntsville, Alabama; and Texas City, Texas, and sales of $40.7 million. [11] The Albany plant was by far the largest, and at the time of its sale to Teledyne, it accounted for around $20 million in annual revenue, with 860 employees at that location. [9] The Alabama factory became a separate subsidiary named Teledyne Wah Chang Huntsville. [12]
In the early 1970s, Wing Mark proposed the idea of making high-purity Hafnium Crystal Bar to Teledyne Wah Chang Albany. He went on to design the production plant, equipment, and process which produced a 99.99999% Hafnium purity, earning him the nickname, “Mr. Hafnium.”
In 1975, TWCA had 1,400 employees, [10] and had $100 million in annual sales. [7]
In 1979, Mark Siddall developed a method for the isotope separation of Zirconium as U.S. patent 4,487,629 . After separation the desired isotopes are converted to the metal by the van Arkel-de Boer process.
In 1982, it entered a joint venture with Mitsui and Ishizuka Research to form Zirconium Industry Corp. Zirconium sponge was produced by this venture in Japan to refine the zirconium sand at a new plant from 1983. [4]
The Millersburg plant was listed as a Superfund site in 1983, requiring environmental clean-up, which the company carried out over the following several years. [13]
Its Glen Cove, New York plant on the North Shore of Long Island became an EPA Superfund site sometime after 1989. [4]
In the 1990s, the company was victimized by the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War, [4] although it still generated research output like U.S. patent 5,171,549 and U.S. patent 5,581,003 .
After TWCA merged with Allegheny Ludlum Corporation in 1996, to become Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, the company became ATI Wah Chang.
In March 2014, [15] it was renamed ATI Specialty Alloys and Components. [16]
Hafnium is a chemical element; it has symbol Hf and atomic number 72. A lustrous, silvery gray, tetravalent transition metal, hafnium chemically resembles zirconium and is found in many zirconium minerals. Its existence was predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, though it was not identified until 1922, by Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy. Hafnium is named after Hafnia, the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered.
Zirconium is a chemical element; it has symbol Zr and atomic number 40. First identified in 1789, isolated in impure form in 1824, and manufactured at scale by 1925, pure zirconium is a lustrous transition metal with a greyish-white color that closely resembles hafnium and, to a lesser extent, titanium. It is solid at room temperature, ductile, malleable and corrosion-resistant. The name zirconium is derived from the name of the mineral zircon, the most important source of zirconium. The word is related to Persian zargun. Besides zircon, zirconium occurs in over 140 other minerals, including baddeleyite and eudialyte; most zirconium is produced as a byproduct of minerals mined for titanium and tin.
Chiang Ching-kuo was a politician of the Republic of China. The eldest and only biological son of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, he held numerous posts in the government of the Republic of China and ended martial law in 1987. He served as the 3rd premier of the Republic of China between 1972 and 1978 and was president of the Republic of China from 1978 until his death in 1988.
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Group 4 is the second group of transition metals in the periodic table. It contains the four elements titanium (Ti), zirconium (Zr), hafnium (Hf), and rutherfordium (Rf). The group is also called the titanium group or titanium family after its lightest member.
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The van Arkel–de Boer process, also known as the iodide process or crystal-bar process, was the first industrial process for the commercial production of pure ductile titanium, zirconium and some other metals. It was developed by Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer in 1925 for Philips Nv. Now it is used in the production of small quantities of ultrapure titanium and zirconium. It primarily involves the formation of the metal iodides and their subsequent decomposition to yield pure metal, for example at one of the Allegheny Technologies' Albany plants.
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