Icon 3CS: breakthrough in the Jewellery space

Icon 3CS

Breakthrough:
A table top plug-in technology to melt and cast precious metals for the production of jewelry in a matter of minutes.

Inventor:
Ali Brey and Irshad Khan, South Africa

The innovation is a potential goldmine as it offers jewelry makers a revolutionary way of working with platinum. The precious metal is not the easiest to work with as it melts at around 2000 degrees Celsius and solidifies within two seconds of the heat being removed. In addition melting and casting typically involves large and very expensive furnaces which can only mass-produce pieces. What the Icon 3CS offers is a way of creating smaller batches or one-off pieces at relatively low-cost. The machine can also melt gold, palladium, silver, and stainless steel and plugs into a standard household electrical socket. It offers small jewelers the opportunity to cast and make their own pieces instead of using a blowtorch (which is a slow and potentially dangerous method).

Induction Heating Technology

At the core of the machine – which is a little bigger than a microwave oven - is an induction heating technology developed by Khan. It has a melting range from as little as 20 grams up to 250 grams of platinum and the casting process is initiated via a computer-controlled interface with an operator entering the metal temperature and casting speed.

The metal is placed in a crucible in an induction coil and is melted via a magnetic field that creates an electrical current that heats the metal quickly. A powerful solid-state high frequency generator creates the alternating current needed for the fast melting. The almost 2,000 degrees Celsius heat is reached within four minutes.

Read more at: http://free.financialmail.co.za/innovations/06/0303/ginn.htm