Typical Heat Treatment Defects of Gears and Solutions Using FEA Modeling

Steel gears are heat treated to obtain enhanced properties and improved service performance. Quench hardening is one of the most important heat treatment processes...

Troubleshooting and Prevention of Cracking in Induction Hardening of Steels: Lessons Learned –...

One of the most common applications of induction heat treatment is the hardening of steels, cast irons, and powder-metallurgy materials, developing an attractive blend...

Enhanced Properties of 17-7 PH Stainless Steel

Background Precipitation-hardening (PH) stainless steel grade 17-7 PH is classified as a semiaustenitic stainless steel used extensively in aerospace and finding new applications in the...

The versatility of the pit furnace

Top-loading furnaces, commonly referred to as pit furnaces, have played a major role in the heating treating landscape for the last century or longer....

Controlling Distortion in Heat Treatment Through Press Quenching

Introduction Press quenching is a specialized quenching technique that may be utilized to minimize the distortion of complex geometrical components during heat treatment1. Distortion is...

High-efficiency gas burners make good economic sense

Even though the price of natural gas is currently low, the investment in high-efficiency gas burners makes sense economically. This article discusses different types...

Induction hardening of cast irons

The success in induction hardening of cast irons and repeatability of obtained results are greatly affected by a potential variation of matrix carbon content.

Gas carburization techniques

A comparison of conventional and accelerated methods for surface hardening

Understanding the Cooling Curve Test

When a hot component comes in contact with the liquid quenchant, there are normally three stages of quenching. There are exceptions to this, which...

Reducing measurement error when making thermocouple transmitter connections

The thermocouple (TC) is a thermo-electric device used to measure temperature and nearly two-thirds of U.S. temperature measurement makes use of thermocouples. Most industrial...

Efficient Gas Heating of Industrial Furnaces

There are various types of high-efficiency gas burners and radiant tubes currently on the market, and economic tools can be used to assess investments...

An In-Depth Look at Polymer Quenchants

Quenching of various alloys to achieve mechanical properties has been an area of scientific research for many years. Using polymer quenchants has proven to...

Computerized Design of Straight Bevel Gears with Optimized Profiles for Forging, Molding, or 3D...

Straight-tooth bevel gears are the simplest type of bevel gears that can be used for power transmission between intersecting shafts. They are commonly referred...

Gas vs. Liquid Quenching: A Direct Comparison in Hardenability to Reduce Distortion

Introduction Hardenability is the ability of steel to partially or completely transform from austenite to some fraction of martensite at a given depth below the...

Quenching: A long and varied history

There have been many myths concerning the quenchants used by ancient blacksmiths in the heat treatment of swords and knives. Various liquids have been...

Selecting the correct industrial ovens for finishing applications

Finishing is defined as “completing the manufacture or decoration of a material or product by giving it an attractive surface appearance.” In industrial applications,...

Advantages of wire-arc additive manufacturing

The concept of additive manufacturing has been around for a century, but with the advent of sophisticated software and robotics, the process is fast...

Stress Generation in an Axle Shaft during Induction Hardening

Introduction Induction hardening of steel components offers a fast heating rate, high efficiency, and the ability to heat locally. Induction hardening is a highly nonlinear...

Improving the mechanical properties of medium carbon steel

Quenching is one of the major processes of heat treatment of medium carbon steel that aims at improving its mechanical properties. However, the effectiveness...

The Advantages of an All-Metal Vacuum Furnace Hot Zone

For more than 70 years, the vacuum furnace has been available for metal processing requirements, and is widely accepted as the ideal equipment for...

Recent progress in three areas of induction-heating technology

This paper introduces recent research progress of induction heating technology at Baosteel, specifically the development of full coil static induction heating technology of the...

Heat Treatment of Large Components

Large gear components can be offered in many applications such as marine, wind power, steel rolling mills, power plants, transportation, railroad, aircraft, cement crushers,...

Gas Nitriding of Titanium

Interest in solution gas nitriding and diffusion of nitrogen into the surface of titanium alloys as a means to inhibit adhesive wear (galling) while...

Hardening of Powder Metallurgy Parts 101

Powder metallurgy (PM) is unique in that one has the ability to create a process system (alloy, process steps, and secondary operations) specific to...

Carburizing and Nitriding Treatment Modeling

(Photo courtesy of Advanced Heat Treat Corp.) Carburizing and nitriding treatments have the same goal: increase hardness on the surface while keeping the core ductility....

Filament-Wound Composites Have Specialized Curing Requirements

Filament winding is a manufacturing method for making tubular and cylindrical shapes of extreme strength and light weight. The technology involves wrapping a mandrel...

How Gears Fail

Heat treatment plays an important — some would say critical — role in gear manufacturing. Therefore, there is a need to better understand, from...

Sintering experiments under way on International Space Station

Gravity is a nonuniform stress that influences sintering densification, microstructure evolution, final properties, and dimensional uniformity. An early conjecture was that in the absence...

Induction Heat Treating: How to Shorten the Time to Production

In an increasingly competitive world, it is good to pause and ask: How can we do our work faster, better, and use fewer resources?...

Case Hardening Basics: Nitrocarburizing vs. Carbonitriding

Confusion surrounding the case-hardening techniques of nitrocarburizing and carbonitriding prove the point that it's easy to get lost in the nomenclature behind heat-treating processes. That...

Producing Quality Parts in an Atmosphere Furnace: How to Optimize Your Quenching and...

Throughout the manufacturing process, heat treatment is consistently viewed as a critical step for adding value to the parts produced. A part expensively manufactured...

Using the correct thermocouple

The principles behind how and why a thermocouple functions were beginning to be understood in the early 1800s with most significant developments taking place...

Reducing Gear Size for Compact Transmission Design by Selecting Steel Grade and Heat Treatment...

Gears are the most important components for transmissions. In many situations, the size of a transmission design needs to be reduced without decreasing power...

Case Study: Laser Hardening

To increase the hardness of a steel material, there are basically three required steps in the hardening process. Step one is to heat the...

Tooth-by-Tooth Induction Hardening of Gears (and How To Avoid Some Common Problems)

Tooth-by-tooth induction hardening of gears is a complex process. Variations of any of kind may be sufficient to cause the process to run out...

Principles of pyrometry

Regarding comprehension, on a scale of 1 to 10, AMS2750E is about a 12. Practically speaking, when an engineer, quality person, or operator picks...

Maintenance Procedures for Vacuum Furnaces

More gear manufacturers need to add vacuum furnace machines to the shop floor and include this procedure in the overall manufacturing process. As vacuum...

Temperature sensor selection: The basics of temperature measurement using thermocouples

You are probably somewhat familiar with the thermocouple, or you wouldn’t be reading this article. But there are important points about thermocouples that must...

Benefits of graphite and C/C fixturing

More heat-treating engineers are making the switch to graphite fixturing using carbon composite materials.

Heat treatment of PM parts by hot isostatic pressing

Several advantages can be seen by using pre-stressed wire-wound hot isostatic presses for consolidating of metal powder.