Kjellberg Finsterwalde
| Kjellberg Finsterwalde
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| legal form | Group of companies |
| founding | 1922 |
| Seat | Finsterwalde , Germany |
| management | Michael Schnick |
| Number of employees | approx. 420 as of 2016 |
| sales | approx. 49 million euros as of 2008 |
| Branch | mechanical engineering |
| Website | www.kjellberg.de |
Kjellberg Finsterwalde is a group of companies in the metal and electrical industry. The group consists of the three manufacturing companies Kjellberg Finsterwalde Plasma und Maschinen GmbH, Kjellberg Finsterwalde Welding Technology and Wear Protection Systems GmbH, Kjellberg Finsterwalde Electrodes and Additional Materials GmbH. Cross-sectional functions are taken over by Kjellberg Finsterwalde Dienstleistungsgesellschaft mbH. The group's shareholder is the Kjellberg Foundation, based in Finsterwalde, Brandenburg . The group manufactures products for thermal material processing ( welding and plasma fusion cutting ).
With around 280 employees, an annual turnover of around 47 million euros was achieved in 2008, more than half of which were abroad. The group has a stake in the Slovak Republic. In addition, Kjellberg Finsterwalde is represented worldwide by partner companies.
Industrial plasma cutting technique (up to 600 are A ), automatic welders and welding electrodes made partly to customer specifications. The company's systems are used, for example, in shipbuilding , the automotive industry or in plant engineering .
history
On June 27, 1908, the Swede Oscar Kjellberg received the imperial imperial patent 231733 "Electrode and process for electrical soldering" and is therefore considered to be the inventor of the coated welding electrode.
Together with six other German and Swedish partners, he founded the ESAB Chief Executive in 1921 in Berlin the Kjellberg electrodes GmbH . The company's purpose was the production and marketing of the patented welding electrodes . Due to a lack of suitable welding power sources , Kjellberg Elektro-Maschinen GmbH was founded in Finsterwalde in 1922 at the suggestion of Oscar Kjellberg . The first Ke 200/1450 welding generator developed and built in Finsterwalde was presented at the Leipzig spring fair in 1923 . In the same year welding electrode production began in Finsterwalde. The oldest product was the OK G2 / 1 stick electrode , an electrode for repair welding .
In 1926, the company was renamed Kjellberg Electrodes and Machines GmbH in line with the changed production profile .
In 1930, Kjellberg laid the foundation for its worldwide success with welding converters. The fundamentally new concept of the machines combined the entire machine set under one housing with a control unit and a steerable chassis. These were further developed into automatic welding machines. In 1934, Kjellberg began with the first investigations. With the market launch of the SI and S II automatic welding machines in 1937, mechanized welding became industrially possible for the first time. Kjellberg offered three technological variants for this: with an electrode replacement head for continuous welding of stick electrodes, with a welding head for bare wire coils and with a carbon head for thin sheet welding.
Important reference objects were the steel structures at Berlin-Tempelhof Airport and the Dresden slaughterhouse bridge .
The patented Kaell-Kjellberg-Lundin process provided a significant boost to metal processing in 1941. A two-wire electrode was welded in three arcs at the same time. At the time, the company was the world's largest manufacturer of arc welding technology .
From 1935 onwards, electrode pressing improved the thickness of the coating and the welding quality compared to the previously common immersion. An important reference object for the new process was the so-called "Kjellberg building", Germany's first fully welded steel frame construction . With its completion in 1936, the company expanded its production facility at its headquarters in Finsterwalde. For the five-story industrial building, 460 t of steel were used and around 35,000 m of weld seams were made.
In 1943, after just two months of development, Kjellberg presented the so-called "Mole", the first industrial solution for automated submerged arc welding .
In 1959, basic tests for plasma fusion cutting of high-alloy steels and aluminum with argon-hydrogen were carried out for the first time at the Manfred von Ardenne Research Institute in collaboration with Kjellberg. With the 50 kW WSH III-M , Kjellberg Finsterwalde delivered the first industrially mature plasma cutting system in 1962. In the same year, the process for plasma fine-beam cutting was further developed and patented together with the Manfred von Ardenne research institute.
In 1970 the company was converted into the state-owned company welding technology Finsterwalde and incorporated into the Mansfeld combine . In the following year, plasma cutting systems were used in parallel for the first time. The company delivered eight systems from the first series to Japan.
In 1973 the Kjellberg plasma cutting system PA 40 was the first plasma cutting machine to cut with cheaper oxygen. In 1979 a research collective from Kjellberg and the Manfred von Ardenne Institute was awarded the GDR's "National Prize for Science and Technology" for their scientific and technical cooperation in the development of the plasma fusion cutting process. As the delivery requests of the Japanese market in Finsterwalde could not be fulfilled in time for reasons of capacity, the Japanese OA-Mach Corporation in Tokyo received a license for the manufacture and sale of plasma cutting torches in 1984 .
In 1986, inverters were used for the first time as power packs for welding and plasma fusion cutting, and a plasma cutting system that could be used under water was presented. At that time there were 1064 employees in the company.
After German reunification in 1991, the sales system was restructured and the product range was largely revised. In cooperation with the Technical University of Hanover and HDW Kiel , multi-burner bevel units were used for the first time in 1993 in the “Shipbuilding 2000” project. With plasma gouging, Kjellberg introduced an alternative to gouging with carbon electrodes for industry in 1996 .
The Kjellberg Foundation was established in 1997 and acts as the company's sole shareholder . Investments in a new assembly and dispatch hall at the headquarters in Finsterwalde improved the production conditions considerably in 1999. HiFocus technology with laser-like cutting quality was brought onto the market in 2000. The introduction of HiFinox technology in the following year made it possible for the first time in the world to have bare metal and beard-free cut surfaces on chrome-nickel steels in thin sheet metal. With the world's first volume flow-controlled automatic plasma gas supply, Kjellberg Finsterwalde opened up a new dimension of quality and reproducibility in plasma cutting in 2003.
A new record was set in 2004 with three FineFocus 800 plasma cutting systems connected in parallel : for the dismantling of the shutdown nuclear reactor in the Karlsruhe Research Center , 130 millimeter thick steel walls were remotely dismantled in several meters of water. In 2007 the Kjellberg Foundation presented a comprehensive investment program to secure the future of Kjellberg Finsterwalde.
In 2008, Kjellberg Finsterwalde Electrodes and Machines GmbH was split up into three independent companies. The Kjellberg Finsterwalde Plasma und Maschinen GmbH , the Kjellberg Finsterwalde Welding Technology and Wear Protection Systems GmbH and the Kjellberg Finsterwalde Electrodes and Additional Materials GmbH were created . Cross-sectional functions are taken over by Kjellberg Finsterwalde Dienstleistungsgesellschaft mbH . The headquarters of Kjellberg Finsterwalde welding technology and wear protection systems GmbH was relocated to Witten in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia . Kjellberg Finsterwalde Electrodes and Additional Materials GmbH moved into a new factory in Massen (Niederlausitz).
