Washington Mills restarts silicon carbide expansion

May 3, 2010 - Washington Mills (WM) has started construction work on the expansion of its crude silicon carbide (SIC) plant at Hennepin, Illinois. WM is one of only a handful of SIC suppliers in North America that include Electro Abrasives LLC and superior Graphite Co..
WM made the decision to increase its capacity to 70,000 tpa through 10,000 tpa expansion back in 2007, but the recession put it on hold.
"We had been planning on the expansion for some time," explained the company's marketing manager, Anne Williams, "but we held back our plans due to the recent economic downturn. We believe the expansion is now timely and will meet expected demand for silicon carbide we are seeing."
The company explained that manufacturing its own raw material allows it to control the quality needed to produce downstream, higher-value products.
The additional SIC could also be used to serve the domestic metallurgical grade market used as an additive in steelmaking. This is an area that WM says is growing.
With a present crude capacity of 60,000 tpa WM is also the largest producer on the continent. The company expects the expansion to be completed at the back end of this year.