Flap-X: a pioneering invention

During its anniversary year 2020, voestalpine Precision Strip developed a pioneering invention: the Flap-X steel grade for flap valves, which makes compressors more efficient, quiet, and durable.During its anniversary year 2020, voestalpine Precision Strip developed a pioneering invention: the Flap-X steel grade for flap valves, which makes compressors more efficient, quiet, and durable.

In the rural community of Munkfors, although many years apart, Johan Börjesson and Gustav Jansson established the 350-year old foundations which form the basis for the success of today’s voestalpine Precision Strip AB.

Metallurgists dancing with joy

It was Börjesson who, in 1670, established the small iron mill which would one day become the Uddeholm steel plant. Here, during the decades preceding and following 1900, Gustav Jansson would refine the cold-rolling technique. If they could now see just how the cold-rolled steel produced at their old site has become a part of daily life for people around the world, they’d be dancing with joy: the steel from Munkfors, and the other plants making up today’s voestalpine Precision Strip, cuts all manner of objects, including bread, plastic waste, and sugar cane, and is used in the men and women’s razor blades manufactured by longstanding customer Gillette, as well as in razors for medical use.

A pioneering invention: the Flap-X steel grade for flap valves.

Flap opens, flap closes

This premium product from Munkfors is also hard at work in countless compressors around the globe in the form of flap valves, which are as essential to compressors as heart valves in humans. As a flap valve opens and closes literally millions of times during its long lifespan, it must be made from steel with excellent material properties, including extreme tensile strength, flatness, surface quality, and steel purity. All this is reliably supplied by Börjesson and Jansson’s successors at voestalpine Precision Strip, 350 years after Börjesson first founded the company.

Flap-X for the future

Building on this laudable past, the developers at voestalpine Precision Strip chose the anniversary year just ended to make a major investment into raising the quality of future output: in 2020, working closely with leading flap valve manufacturers and compressor OEMs, they developed the superior Flap-X steel grade. Its performance is unmatched by any other flap valve steel. Once again, voestalpine Precision Strip is leading the way in creating significant innovations— compressors whose hearts of steel make them more efficient, durable, and quieter than ever before.