Aluminium billet casting line — from own scrap to extrusion billets

A billet casting line closes the aluminium loop inside your plant: production scrap — profile ends, saw offcuts, rejects — goes into the melting furnace and comes back to the press as full-value extrusion billet. With today's billet premiums and a growing scrap stream, more and more extruders are running this calculation seriously; the same line also works as the core business of a recycler selling billets to extrusion plants.

The heart of the line is vertical semi-continuous casting with air-slip mould technology: a thin oil-and-air film between the solidifying metal and the mould produces billets with a smooth surface and a thin segregation zone — good for extrusion without scalping, which directly improves yield when you remelt your own scrap. The oil/air supply system includes a graphite tester for checking the permeability of the mould rings. Metal quality is guarded by an electromagnetic stirrer under the tilting melting furnace (uniform chemistry and bath temperature), a box-type degasser working in-line between furnace and casting table, and filtration. The furnace fires through regenerative burners that recover flue-gas heat — the biggest single cost lever in remelting.

Honestly: this is a project-class investment, not an off-the-shelf machine. It pays off with a stable scrap stream — indicatively from several hundred tonnes a year — and freshly cast billets still need homogenizing before the press, so we typically quote the line together with a homogenizing furnace from our industrial furnace range. We size melting capacity, billet diameters and lengths to your press and scrap mix, publish indicative price ranges instead of 'price on request', and walk you through the full plant economics in our extrusion line cost guide. (US spelling: aluminum billet casting line.)