Haworth Castings produces high-quality cast enclosures for a wide range of industry sectors. We make these technically-demanding products consistently to high standards and have the knowledge and experience to guide customers towards the best solutions.
What is an enclosure?
Enclosures are protective housings that encapsulate components. Typically designed as a vessel and a lid, their purpose is to form a secure barrier, protecting the contents from the external environment and vice versa.
Where are enclosures used?
Many of the enclosures cast by Haworth Castings are used for electrical or mechanical components, supplied to a broad spectrum of customers, from the oil and gas industry to automotive and industrial applications. Recent applications include cast enclosures for the electrical components of satellites and street lighting; for battery housings in electric vehicles; and for sensors and detectors in the oil and gas industry.
Can cast enclosures meet high specifications?
Clearly the demands of the exact application will determine the specifications, but all Haworth Castings enclosures are delivered to exacting customer requirements. Haworth’s robust production processes produce castings that are consistent and repeatable, and often with highly-accurate, complex cast features such as cooling fins. Critical features such as sealing faces, apertures and mounting points can then be precision machined to meet extremely tight dimensional tolerances.
Haworth Castings supplies cast enclosures to a range of sectors requiring compliance to extremely high safety standards. For example, in the petrochemical and oil & gas industries a high specification seal and robust blast resistance are crucial. In such cases the enclosure may prevent electronic failures from sparking fires in the local environment, or protect critical components from blast. Haworth Castings produces high specification cast enclosures that meet ATEX certification.
How is the enclosure sealed for protection?
Cast enclosures are sealed in a number of ways, including:
- Using a gasket or independent seal
- Using a threaded interfacing mechanism
- By producing precision-flat surfaces that mate perfectly
In each case, the tolerance of these critical areas is essential in order to provide the required seal and meet customer specifications and testing criteria. In most cases, cast enclosures will also be CNC machined to create threaded apertures, machine mating faces and ensure that internal mounting points and pillars fit precisely.
What materials are used for cast enclosures?
The appropriate material for a cast enclosure will depend on the application. Haworth Castings casts a range of aluminium alloys, providing castings that have excellent strength-to-weight ratios and that offer specific properties such as resistance to corrosion for uses such as marine applications.
Haworth Castings can advise on the right selection of aluminium alloy for your cast enclosure. With the help of our sister company Investacast we can also provide you with the best casting solution across a wide range of ferrous alloys.
Can enclosures be machined instead of cast?
Enclosures can also be machined from solid, but as a subtractive manufacturing process the consumption of raw material is significantly higher and production cycle times tend to be much longer. It is therefore usually more cost-effective to cast enclosures, and finish with machining for high volume production requirements. Haworth has a track record of helping customers achieve significant cost downs by converting machined-from-solid-parts to castings.
That said, certain applications demand the use of machining-from-solid and, quite often, machining-from-solid is the chosen option for lower volume requirements, and ramp-ups to full production. Through our sister company Metaltech Precision, we offer the full range of CNC machining services.
Experienced technical advice from Haworth Castings
Haworth Castings is renowned for its technical expertise and specialises in the casting of complex parts to demanding standards. We have considerable expertise in the production of cast enclosures and are always happy to advise product designers and engineers on the best way to design for manufacture.
Typically, we start with a CAD drawing and an understanding of the technical specification and product demands, and advise customers on the appropriate alloy, casting method and machining and finishing processes and we always produce samples, allowing the customer to assess the casting and make any required modifications prior to production.
To find out more, contact us on 01794 512685.