Nippon Light Metal Releases Highly Accurate Aluminium Plate

Nippon Light Metal (NLM) reinforces its aluminium plate business. The firm announced on Tuesday the successful development of new aluminium plate with more dimensional accuracy than conventional aluminium plates. The firm starts commercial sales of new aluminium plate, named N-FLAT, this month. NLM also announced the firm increases aluminium plate production at Nagoya plant by 50% to 1,500 tonnes with approximately 100 million yen capex.

N-FLAT has flatness with more accurate than conventional general-grade A5052 plate. The flatness is especially high at 0.4 millimeter per meter length for N-FLAT with 12-30 mm thickness, which is better than NLM’s conventional general-grade plate with 0.5mm flatness per meter length. NLM can supply N-FLAT with 4-100 mm thickness and 0.8-1% tolerance. The sizes are 1,000 x 2,000 mm, 1,250 x 2,500 mm and 1,525 x 3,050 mm.

NLM plans to sell N-FLAT to the customers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. Aluminium plate is majorly used for semiconductor and liquid crystal panel manufacturing equipments, precision machinery components and metal dies. In recent years, the users in these application fields require higher dimensional accuracy and better productivity for aluminium plate.

As for output expansion at Nagoya plant, NLM will introduce the second plate saw and raise the aluminium plate production by 50%.