Sandvik Coromant invests in R&D

During April, Sandvik Coromant inaugurated its newly updated R&D Centre for solid end mills in Rovereto Italy.

The unit is the company's first R&D office in Italy and the third to be upgraded as part of a new global Research and Development cluster comprising offices in Sheffield and Halmstad, Sweden.

The cluster is responsible for research and new product development within the areas of round tools for drilling, threading and milling. The sites have been subject to a multi-million SEK investment including purpose built work environments, test workshops and state of the art laboratories. In Italy, the centre has also received partial funding from the autonomous region of Trento, a part of Italy that lends strong support to research and development as part of its economy.

“The investments in our round tools operations in Halmstad, Sheffield and Rovereto supports the development of global R&D and is also an important part of the increasing diversity within Sandvik Coromant,” says Göran Berter, vice president R&D at Sandvik Coromant.

As the industry becomes more and more technologically advanced, the demand on rapid R&D and speed in production increases. Sandvik Coromant's global set-up allows it to work closely with customer development projects resulting in optimised products, value added applications and new productivity standards. Today the company is cooperating with more than 70 external competence centres, universities and institutes (including the AMRC in Sheffield) on projects involving alloy development, application development, the formulation of new calculation and simulation techniques and material modelling.

The new 800m² R&D Centre in Italy is twice the size of the existing facility. The workshop and laboratory have been refurbished and the machine park extended with new machines and the latest generation 3D scanning and simulation technology.

The department's activities include tool design, experimentation, and the development of new products, technological research, new milling techniques and new materials.

Sandvik Coromant
www.sandvik.coromant.com