“It’s about life-cycle cost management,” Tom Trotter, v-p and general manager of Chromalloy Castings, told AIN about the company’s new 150,000-sq-ft investment casting operation in Tampa, Fla. “We are now able to offer the industry a single source for engine component design, engineering, tooling, machining, repairs, coatings and now castings,” he said. According to Trotter, it is the only facility in the world that can investment cast aerospace gas turbine blades from the smallest up to and including large, heavy industrial gas turbine blades and vanes other than those made under contract for the OEMs. The facility is designed to pour up to one million pounds of super-alloy turbine components and parts for an engine hot section, or critical gas path, for the entire range of jet aircraft, marine, aero-derivative and heavy frame industrial turbines, including the largest power generation engines. The operation employs equiaxed, directionally solidified and advanced, single-crystal casting technologies. The company is also adding a $5 million ceramic core production facility to manufacture the critical ceramic cores used to cast super-alloy turbine engine vanes and blades. It is slated to be operational early next year.