Thermochemical Surface Technologies Applicable to Gears

Hardening of the gear surfaces has a profound effect on their performance. Reduction in friction, enhancing rolling contact fatigue resistance, and other tribological properties...

Purchasing Tips

Purchasing an atmosphere or vacuum heat-treating system is much like purchasing a new car or a home — a lot of thought, research, and...

Energy Efficiency

“Hey, close the door — what do you think, we’re heating the neighborhood?” These are words I heard uttered by Mom and Dad over...

Workforce Development

How many times have we heard, “Our company is only as good as our people.” Yet more often than not, the majority of the...

Distortion Engineering of Gears

The causes for distortion of gears are complex and the heat treatment process has been named as a main contributing factor . However, the...

Surface Properties

Proper selection of steel and its heat treatment is a fundamental challenge for gear designers and manufacturers. However, performance and endurance limits of the teeth...

Deep Nitriding for Gear Applications and Their Partial Treatments

Stress conditions inside gear teeth are complex and require a careful examination by the designer before any specific surface treatment of the gears should...

Lean Manufacturing

The thermal processing industry is at a turning point. A point in which digital technology can manage process variables, enhance productivity, and optimize heat...

Modern Nitriding Techniques for Gear Applications

Improving surface properties of gears can be extremely beneficial since many failures start at the surface in the contact area between the teeth ....

Surface Engineering

Wear, corrosion, and fatigue failures are the most important mechanisms that lead to material degradation, which eventually causes failure of many gears. Those failures...

Controls Software in Atmosphere Equipment

An essential part of producing quality parts is achieving precise control over your processes and atmosphere equipment. As such, utilizing intuitive controls software with...

Convection Phase

Anyone who has attended a technical seminar on quenching has heard of the three stages of oil quenching: the vapor phase, the film boiling...

Heat Treating and Unintended Consequences

Load size, total weight, and surface area are important considerations for several reasons when heat treating. First, surface area must match the carbon content...

Heat-treat troubleshooting

The following discussion is not about six-sigma or even three-sigma practices. It focuses on my experience assisting a recent heat treater. The calls I...

Brazing as a heat-treating process

Brazing is a genre of heat treating that doesn’t receive a lot of attention unless it’s related to aerospace or commercial aviation. However, a...

Metal alternatives — ceramics and ceramic composites — are achieving real-world applications

Ever since iron-bearing meteorites were discovered on earth, metal has been the material of choice for making almost anything requiring greater strength than wood....

Critical and non-critical aspects of achieving expected results in heat treating processes

There have been thousands of scholarly articles and how-to books written about heat treating and its related metallurgy. In past columns, I’ve opined that...

Heat treating in the United States – where have we been and where we...

I can remember way back in the mid-seventies when the programmable logic controller (PLC) was just starting to make its way into heat treating...

Heat treating is an energy hog where three energy sources find application: natural gas,...

A conundrum exists in that natural gas, coal, and fissionable metals are used to make electricity and, in some shape or form, electricity is...

(LPC) furnaces employ strategically positioned jets, and atmosphere furnaces must use the proper fan

When it comes to carburizing or protecting parts subjected to an atmosphere, fan- and gas-injection methods become the critical factor. Vacuum furnaces have air...