As a major player in the nuclear industry, ALSYMEX has developed deep expertise in the design and manufacture of glove boxes and containment systems for critical environments.
ALSYMEX’s customized solutions meet the most stringent safety, cleanliness, and containment requirements for the handling, transfer, and transformation of radioactive materials under containment or controlled, neutral gas atmospheres.

ALSYMEX’s expertise:

Mechanical & Boilermaking Expertise

ALSYMEX brings proven skills in mechanics, sheet metal work, and radiation protection, ensuring operator safety and structural integrity under the most demanding conditions.

Assembly & Welding under Confinement

All assembly and welding processes are precisely adapted to containment constraints, carried out in strict compliance with nuclear safety standards governing every phase of design, manufacturing, and integration.

Ergonomics & Maintainability

From the earliest stages of each project, Alsymex integrates ergonomic principles and maintenance accessibility, guaranteeing both ease of operation and long-term maintainability of the equipment.

Multidisciplinary Engineering Approach

ALSYMEX’s expertise combines mechanical, process, and safety engineering expertise to ensure the reliability, performance, and safety of every glove box installation.

Every glove box designed by ALSYMEX reflects its commitment to precision engineering, radiological safety, and operator comfort.

Through its brand CHAMPALLE, ALSYMEX also provides expertise in:

• Process and equipment nuclearization for contaminating environments
• Design and maintenance of mechanical and electromechanical systems
• Integration of decontaminable and maintainable solutions (conveying, handling, machining, characterization…)

ALSYMEX has a unique know-how designing and developing electric and hydraulic presses and in pressing active powders, in particular. Fosterint its extensive intelletual property, it meets customers’ individual specifications in terms of reliability, productivity, compacity and maintainability.

These presses are used to manufacture different types of pellets, either of cylindrical, annular or parallelepipedal shape, to be afterwards sintered. Dimensional accuracy is predetermined and surface finish must be perfect.

ALSYMEX’s experience makes it possible to offer complete solutions, including design and manufacture of:

• Upstream installations to prepare powder for pressing
• Complete presses, certified for operation in explosive environments, together with their PC-supervised control equipment
• Downstream control stations to check pellet dimensions (laser) and surface finish (camera)
• Palletizing systems to transfer pellets to sintering furnaces and others downstream operations

ALSYMEX designs electric and hydraulic weighing up to 1,000 tons and more, capable of producing one to nine pellets per cycle (up to nine as a standard; more is possible on request). The die-holding tool is fitted with a sealed oil pressure compensator to ensure that pressing is well distributed on every punch. Upon request, the press is fitted with or floating matrix.

Specificities of ALSYMEX presses lie in the fact that they are especially sturdy and accurate and are perfectly designed to meet specific requirements and constraints related to nuclear environments.

ALSYMEX has a high mastery of edge-to-edge pulsed and continuous laser welding processes. This mastery of such processes allows addressing applications requiring the realization of edge-to-edge metal junctions, ensuring better mechanical tensile strengths than those of the basic materials of the assembly, a high level of sealing (leakage rate 10^-9 mbar/l.s), robustness in thermal environment (-50°C to +150°C), vacuum (10^-6 mbar) and under pressure (a few hundred bars).

The materials used are:

• Metal sheets a few tenths of a millimeter thick and formed in 3 dimensions
• Titanium, Stainless steels, complex alloys…

The processes implemented meet specific requirements:

• Cutting and machining of elementary plates with accuracies of a few hundredths
• Definition of Laser welding parameters
• Control of the phases of continuous or pulsed laser welding
• Dimensional and non-destructive controls (ultrasound, X-ray) after welding

Some examples:

• Accumulator for aeronautical and space applications
• Tanks for chemical industry applications
• Complex thermal insulation functions
• Barometric capsules and welded cup bellows

ALSYMEX has expertise in the field of reliability and dependability studies, developed particularly for hyper-critical equipment addresses notably the following skills :

• The recurrent development of equipment with a high level of reliability and safety (failure rate up to 10-6), for lifespans of up to 300,000 operating hours
• A proper methodology for identifying aging phenomena
• The implementation of predictive calculation tools
• The perfect knowledge of the standards governing these analyses

Mastering this expertise allows ALSYMEX to address applications in the fields of Defense, Aeronautics, Space and Nuclear, among others, and particularly the development of flow control valves for satellite propulsive subsystems :

• Flow control for propulsion applications requiring precise altitude, trajectory and orbit control of satellites and spacecraft
• High-precision components, robust and proven design (Flight Proven), own manufacturing
• Range covering thrust motor needs 1 to 500 Newton, monopropellant or bi-propellant:

• Apogee engines of geostationary telecommunication satellites
• Propulsion engines and for attitude control of small satellites in low orbit