Process

For us, innovation means introducing efficient and innovative technology to extend the undercarriage component life, thus reducing our customers’ operating costs.

Berco R&D fosters close collaboration with customers, as well as with our professionals from the Technical, Quality, Product Support and Production Engineering teams.

Assisted design tools and other technical instruments are used during engineering and prototyping to design, test and optimize each part before production. Our metallurgical laboratory has specific skills and instruments to validate products in all sectors.

Reliability tests are carried out on Berco’s undercarriage spare parts to compare durability and performance across various fields of application. Viewing techniques and artificial intelligence are used to automatically inspect each part to significantly reduce faults. With this approach, we develop new materials and fine-tune heat treatment processes to guarantee superior, durable products.

Berco’s team of engineers is focused on the design of undercarriage components for complete tracked vehicle systems. We combine more than 100 years of experience with CAD & CAE instruments that allow us to customize our products according to the individual needs of our customers, while reducing design and production costs.

Investing in automation means safer operations for our employees, greater production capacity, higher flexibility and better manufacturing cycle reliability and in the end higher product quality. Our factories offer technical solutions including wrist robots, gantry robots, hydraulic handlers with self-learning capacities, stacker cranes for handling pallets and much more.

A key focus in the adoption of these technical solutions is the automation of logistics and handling processes (via storage and retrieval machines, etc.) during the various stages of production. The wide range of products and processes present at Berco has allowed us to develop a deep knowledge in robotics and automation over the years.

Our heat treatment processes are the focus of continuous innovation to guarantee superior quality products with excellent wear resistance in all conditions. Furthermore, in Berco we continuously carry out in-depth studies on the materials best suited to satisfying the wide range of undercarriage component applications.

Heat treatment processes are optimized for all product types. The main process parameters (temperature gradients, time, temperatures, chemical composition, etc.) are constantly monitored in real time by computer systems connected to the company network to guarantee the highest quality heat treatment standards.  We have gained significant industrial expertise over the last 100 years in optimizing these processes and integrating them with other processing steps to obtain superior products.

Our research has spurred the development and completion of major systems that are one-of-a-kind in their field of application, such as:

• Maxi-Press and Midi-Press hot forging lines: some of the largest screw presses in the world, the first with a capacity of 32,000 tons and the second with a capacity of 16,000, make us the only company capable of forging large-size undercarriage components for mining applications;
• Circular rolling mills with four mandrels: for rolling front-welded bare wheel rings in one step;
• Fast link forging line: developed per Berco’s specific design, this is a 3,150 ton mechanical press for hot forging medium links for high production frequencies, reducing the need for billets, compared to conventional processes;
• High-temperature case-carburizing furnaces: these new furnaces, developed specifically for Berco, can reach unprecedented case-carburizing temperatures;
• Deep grinding: our deep-grinding machines offer creep-feed technology, originally used in the automotive sector, and have revolutionized joint link production, making Berco the benchmark for the undercarriage market.

Hot forging results in better finishes and better product quality, compared to casting, eliminating faults such as surface and interior casting pinholes, which may seriously compromise product reliability and cause production rejects.

Our forging technology know-how, developed over more than 100 years of activity, allows us to develop high quality products on our 20 hot forging lines, via over 3,000 sets of dies that use a modern tooling system comprised of next-generation, high-speed machining tools. With our hot forging line, “Maxi-Press”, which includes a 32,000-ton and a 16,000-ton screw press, we are able to forge even large-size products used on mining machinery, for use in every heavy wear and load condition.