Keeping your burners tuned
The backbone of any atmosphere furnace is the heating system. The heating system plays an essential role in keeping the furnace operating at peak...
Anatomy of a Heat-Treating System
Ninety-eight 600-pound trays are in continuous process, 13 are in the pre-process queue, nine preheating, 14 in the boost carb, eight in the diffusion...
A Short Guide on Water Vapor
Water vapor (e.g., excessive retained humidity) is the most commonplace enemy of vacuum furnaces. In fact, it is the No. 1 threat to everyday...
Getting Control — Let’s Start with PID
It does not matter what thermal treatment work piece requires, proper control is the foundation for repeatability and quality processing. For heat-treating processes, there...
Q&A with Daniel Reardon
What is Abbott Furnace's mission?
Our mission is to be the market leader in the design, production, and service of continuous process industrial furnaces. And...
Determining Austenite Grain Size
Grain size is a critical metallurgical characteristic, significantly influencing design parameters such as strength and toughness. Austenite grain size (often referenced to as prior-austenite...
The State of Process Controls
It is hard to find a market segment that has not benefited from technology advancements. Heat-treating process control is no different. While there are...
Q&A with Aziz Jamaluddin
What is Epcon?
Epcon is a full-service organization, starting with front-end business development/marketing, sales and application engineering, through complete in-house engineering, design, and drafting —...
Non-Martensitic Transformation Products (NMTP)
Whether formed during a conventional quench and tempering process, carburizing, or induction hardening, non-martensitic transformation products (NMTP) are widely considered undesirable microstructural features. However,...
Meeting Automotive Efficiency Standards
For automobiles where competing hardening processes and materials are involved, automotive designers and heat treaters have choices when deciding how to meet efficiency standards.
There...
Performing a Temperature Uniformity Survey
Performing a temperature uniformity survey (TUS) can be somewhat of a daunting process. After all, a TUS carries the weight of not only being...
The Right Prepared Atmosphere
Furnace atmospheres are critical to meeting metallurgical specifications defined by control processes. The makeup of a furnace’s atmosphere in the heat-treating process varies based...
Q&A with Joe Stambaugh
Pease tell us a little about your background and company.
My education was in electromechanical technologies. I have spent my 40-year career working in the...
Coupling Alloy and Process Selection
Combining both alloying and processing into a single strategy to achieve a desired level of performance sounds like a simple concept, but can be...
Heat Treating, Furnaces, and Unintended Consequences
A few decades ago, my involvement with depleted uranium (DU) began in the metallurgical R&D department, developing program logic to heat treat DU in...
Vacuum Furnace Leaks
The process of finding leaks in your vacuum heat-treating system can sometimes be a lengthy process. However, a deeper understanding of best practices for...
Carburizing Optimization & ECD Precise Control
As discussed in the September/October 2016 Metal Urgency column , carburizing is a nonsteady-state diffusion process and thus can be expressed by Fick’s second...
Furnace Types
Heat treating furnaces consist of several subassemblies: insulation (fiber and brick), heating systems (electric and gas), material handling, quenching, atmosphere system, process and control...
Extending the Hot Zone’s Life Span
One most commonly recommended procedure for making your equipment perform more effectively is to run a cleanup cycle, which removes contaminants from within the...
Pyrometry, Industry Standards, & Temperature Uniformity Surveys
In its simplest sense, pyrometry is the measurement of temperatures. Practically speaking, in the business of heat treatment, the term also refers to the...
Q&A with Bill St. Thomas
Please tell us a little about your background.
I started in the heat treating industry back in the late 1960s working for one of my...
Q&A with Andrew Bassett
How did ATP get started?
During the early 1990s, the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (Nadcap) began embracing all special processes, and we...
Furnace Doors
No matter the configuration, single or multi-chamber vacuum, batch integral quench, continuous, or even pits — an item that all furnaces have in common...
Q&A with George Barbour
Please tell us a little about Heavy Carbon Co.
The company began in 1995 as an idea for carburizing steel at a cleaner, faster rate...
Thermal Process Modeling
Thermal process modeling has been a hot topic in the heat treating community over the past few years. The project conducted by ASM International...
Carbon Diffusion and Carburizing Parameter Selection
Although carburizing is a complicated process, it can be broken down into two main steps: carbon generation in the furnace and carbon diffusion into...
Stainless Steels
Kitchen sinks, refrigerator or oven doors, and tableware are what many people think of when they are asked what’s made from stainless steel (SS)....
Q&A with Bill Stuehr
Please tell us how Induction Tooling began.
In 1975, I was working as a process design engineer with a local commercial heat treating company. Several...
Gas Nitriding
In general, nitriding of parts involves a thermal process that provides a tough, corrosion-resistant, and wear-resistant surface with less distortion compared to other case...
Carburizing
While some heat treatments are used to soften the material or improve its machinability, most are processed to obtain strengthened or hardened properties. The...
Heating with natural gas
It’s no secret that the heat treating industry is one of the major recipients of the impact when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)...
Q&A with Dennis Beauchesne
When was vacuum carburizing introduced?
The process has been around since the 1960s. Vacuum carburizing enables more precise control of case depth and microstructure than...
Control technology
There are many demands for precision manufacturing of steel components. Heat treatment is a critical step in nearly all manufacturing processes to achieve required...
Hardening and tempering in the same cell
Tempering hardened steels is one of the most important heat treating processes used in part manufacturing. Induction tempering produces hardness and mechanical properties similar...
Q&A with Brian Russell
Q: Tell me a little about the history of Dry Coolers, Inc.
We started in 1985 to provide cooling water solutions for heat treating equipment—for...
True Carbon Potential
The relationship between a carbon-rich atmosphere and its effects on low-carbon steel are well known. The evolution of carburizing led to in-situ monitoring of...
Materials Selection for Induction Hardening Processes
Induction hardening is the most common technique of the various types of applied energy processing. It uses alternating current that induces a magnetic field...
Intensive Quenching Calls For Very High Cooling Rates Part 2
Intensive quenching (IQ) is defined as cooling, usually using pure water, at a rate several times higher than the rate of conventional quenching. Fast,...
Poor Carbon Control
Carburizing has an advantage over other gear case hardening processes because it increases a gear’s ability to carry high torque. Carbon control is critical to...
Different Scales Are Used For Rockwell Hardness Testing
Production Bench Rockwell Hardness Testing of Small Work Pieces
As induction hardened workpieces get smaller in size, attention to the proper abrasive cutting of the...
