One of the world’s twenty largest automotive suppliers has ordered a vacuum furnace for aluminum brazing from Seco/Warwick. The furnace will be used by the partner’s R&D department to conduct development tests in the field of aluminum vacuum brazing.
The VAB furnace on order is intended for vacuum brazing aluminum components; the design is based on detailed guidelines and customer needs, and is therefore, a tailor-made solution.
The VAB solution is an advanced vacuum furnace for aluminum vacuum brazing with a non-standard design, built on the foundation of a single-chamber Vector furnace.
“Orders requiring a specific approach always make us happy, because it builds, inspires, and develops both our body of knowledge and the technology,” said Maciej Korecki, vice president of the Vacuum Furnace Segment at Seco/Warwick. “This project was certainly a challenge for the entire Seco/Warwick team, because the partner’s assumptions, in relation to the requirements placed on our furnace, were really high. They required a very complicated and individual solution in the form of a cuboid shape of the heating chamber equipped with flat, large-surface heating elements. They were arranged in twelve independent temperature control zones, ensuring very high dynamics of load heating and ideal temperature uniformity.”
Seco/Warwick has experience in supplying vacuum equipment to corporations involved in the production of parts for the automotive industry. Each new contract, especially of this type, is another experience with the industry that continues to require very specific and complex brazing processes as the technology evolves.
“We were tasked with creating a VAB furnace with unique solutions: a special square heating chamber equipped with flat heating elements made of Inconel 600 material, arranged in twelve independent temperature control zones,” said Łukasz Chwiałkowski, sales manager at Seco/Warwick. “A characteristic feature of this unit is also a high-performance, high-vacuum pumping system consisting of a mechanical pump, a Roots pump, and a diffusion pump. Such an extensive high-vacuum system also requires non-standard cooling, in the form of a dedicated chiller-based system.”
For this partner, Seco/Warwick has previously provided a number of solutions, including vacuum technology. For the first time, however, the Seco/Warwick furnace will be used by the R&D department in the German plant.
“We are pleased that our furnace will be used in the partner’s R&D operations,” said Chwiałkowski. “And it is even more pleasing because the purchasing decision is the result of conducting development processes on our furnace in the R&D department (Seco/Tech) until the new furnace is delivered to the customer’s plant. Such tests are a unique opportunity to independently check the operation of the VAB technology and verify the new aluminum alloys in terms of Flux elimination.”
A special advantage of this unique vacuum brazing technology is flux-free brazing, which offers the advantages of eliminating flux contamination and designing blind cavities, winding paths, and small passages in brazed parts, eliminating the harmful effects associated with flux removal and its entrapment after brazing.
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