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A second heat treatment effector exists in an industrial furnace, one that’s sometimes forgotten by the average layperson. Besides the heat source, the gas-fuelled or electrically energized thermal energy flowing evenly around a subject workpiece, there’s the atmosphere inside that sealed chamber to consider. Sometimes, the atmosphere is totally taken out of the heat treatment […]

As a rule, the inner workings of a vacuum furnace are ordinarily composed of a series of sealed firebox chambers. At the centre of this airtight assemblage, a leakproof furnace shell is hooked to an air purging pump. Heat-inducing elements, perhaps made out of fitted graphite or ceramic, provide all workload thermal energies. Further controlling […]

Metals harden when they’re heated, or they become more ductile when they’re heated then cooled at a specific rate. Interestingly enough, metal workpieces change in other ways when cooking in a furnace. With their grains realigning as the thermal energy sends the material into a state of atomic flux, the material becomes more conductive. No […]

Red Hardness, the terminology paints quite a picture. After a steel workpiece slides into a furnace, it soaks up so much thermal that it becomes “red hot.” Alloy microstructures alter when they reach this point. The steel hardens. More importantly, the metal retains this hardness quotient after it cools. That’s an important detail here. Marquenching, […]

Once upon a time, blacksmiths heat-treated swords and armour. The job came to an end as the object sizzled in a barrel of water. That action toughened the metal. Just like that, there was no brittleness to worry about during the heat of battle. Modern heat treatment processes have similar goals, that much hasn’t changed, […]

Engine connecting rods will be used to illustrate today’s issue. Utilized as key motion imparting components, these rigid steel connectors move in long, linearly oriented strokes. From piston to crankshaft, the linear relationship is maintained. One other thing, the rods have to be hardened by a heat-treatment process. And therein lies the problem. You see, […]

Much though engineers wish the opposite were true, heat treatment work can weaken welded joints. Since welding equipment uses thermal energy to fuse parts together and add filer metals, the application of more heat can further alter a weld’s jointing properties. A frustrating fact indeed, especially since heat treatment processing uses an inordinate amount of […]

Just as a reminder, induction hardening technology is used to enhance the toughness and fatigue resistance of carbon steel parts. Components to be heat treated are placed inside a furnace, around which a copper-wound electrical coil runs. When this induction coil is energized, it generates a strong magnetic field, which “induces” workpiece heat. However, although […]

Three primary heat treatment phases break down into multiple branches and subsets. First comes the heating, the stage that thermally alters a part’s microcrystalline structure. As the work comes to a climax, the cooling phase allows the material to return to room temperature. At least as important, an “in-between” phase holds the furnace temperature at […]

Not every processing pipeline in a heat treatment facility is mechanically oriented. Away from the vacuum-sealed furnaces and quenching tanks, the alloy hardening work is viewed from a different perspective. Surrounded by computers and process viability statistics, a risk assessment team is hard at work. Somewhat ironically, the engineers who’re caught up in this stress […]