Quality Engineering Intern

Combined Metals Overview

Combined Metals is a premier North American processor and distributor of specialty strip and wire built through 50 years of growth and acquisition. Combined Metals is the largest independent processor and distributor of specialty strip and wire in North America. With nine service centers, Combined Metals supports over 3,000 customers in the Aerospace, Defense, Nuclear, Medical, Petrochemical, Oil & Gas, Electrification, Automotive, and Consumer industries.

Decades of quality and reliability have made Combined Metals a chosen source in performance applications.

Our Elgin manufacturing sites produce a wide range of Steel, Titanium, Nickel, and Cobalt metal alloys for Aerospace, Nuclear, Oil & Gas and medical devices applications. These high-performance alloys can be used in extreme environments such as high-temperature jet engine turbine components or the highly corrosive components in Gas & Oil applications. To achieve the correct final metal properties our manufacturing team follows a very specific set of parameters (process routes) during our cold rolling and heat treatment operations.

With more than 50 different alloys and hundreds of specific process routes, maintaining and developing new process routes becomes very time consuming and error prone. For example, for almost every new order the sales, production control and operation teams must create a new processing recipe.

To be successful, the candidate will need to gain knowledge in metal manufacturing (cold rolling, heat treatment, slitting) as well as other support areas, such as quality, production control and scheduling. The candidate will have access to our manufacturing floor and be able to see first-hand our equipment and operations.

Candidate will focus on developing reports and monitoring tools to provide Quality and Production teams with real-time status of our processes. Most of the machines in our process collect data that is currently not easily accessible or visible to the Quality or Production teams. Creating reports will allow more effective monitoring of our processes in real time and with root cause investigation when problems are identified internally or by our customers.

Elgiloy employs a range of measuring equipment, including calipers, micrometers, tensile machines, hardness testers, etc. There are statistical methods commonly used in manufacturing to determine how accurate these measuring methods are and if not accurate the methods help determine if the equipment needs to be improved or the operator needs to be re-trained. The candidate will coordinate and oversee the evaluation of some of our most critical measuring methods.

One of the most common quality issues Elgiloy encounters are surface defects on our product, such as scratches, dents and contamination. We are in the process of implementing an inspection vision system able to detect a wide range of defects. The system uses AI technology to learn new defects and highlight them. The candidate will help train the system and fine tune the parameters for effective identification of defects.