Thursday, March 28, 2024

Achieving low ppm oxygen levels: Pumps are slow to remove water vapor while an...

Vacuum furnaces rely on the lack of an atmosphere to protect heat-treated parts from surface oxidation or decarburization. The quality of the atmosphere required...

Exploring today’s heat-treating process involving furnaces, pumps

Depending on their specific heat-treatment application, atmospheric and vacuum furnaces use pumps. In this column, the pumps I reference refer to any device designed...

Why heat-treating equipment suppliers are unclear as to what the future may hold

It was early October while I was listening to the Paul W. Smith morning radio show on WJR when I couldn’t believe what I...

Achieving modernization in carburizing and quenching requires an overhaul of load sizes and materials...

As the effort to automate heat treating has evolved, OEMs — especially automotive suppliers —  have embraced the effort to move the process from...

Metallurgical and heat-treat forensics play important part in determining how and why parts fail

Automobiles and airplanes have been in the news recently — GM cars for ignition recall issues and airplanes because of crashes due to weather,...

An armchair guide for predicting results for LPC and atmosphere carburizing

Over the last few years I’ve contributed to discussion and dissection, and have generally peeled away the layers to discover how the LPC and...

Heat treating, carburizing, and furnaces: how and why we arrived where we are today

In the most general terms, heat treating is an atmospheric or vacuum process with applications for hydrocarbons to ferrous and nonferrous metals. The largest...

FNC and gas nitriding use in applications where reduced surface friction is a requirement

Gears are not the only commodity to receive the benefit from FNC (Ferritic-Nitro carburizing). Brake rotors have also become a popular recipient of the...

An accurate comparison between LPC/HPGQ and endo atmosphere carburizing cell

Typically, LPC/HPGQ systems have evolved into individual batch carburizing chambers with continuous prewash, pre-oxidizing, and continuous tempers. Atmosphere carburizing cells retain a complete batch...

Equipment hardware with nitrogen/methanol carburizing atmosphere and the necessary utility configurations

In the March Hot Seat column, I presented the operating cost for a standard UBQ batch furnace carburizing cell processing 3000 net pounds of...

Heat treating is all about using the most cost-effective process

Gears come in all shapes and sizes, made by a myriad of methods: forged, cast, PM, etc. Virtually all methods require heat treating of...

Like any problem, a heat-treating difficulty must be dissected into smaller parts

What follows is a true account in a captive heat treat facility with batch integral quench furnaces, one of which was carburizing without a...

From smaller cold-formed steel, gears can be cold pressed into the final shape and...

All gears begin their lives as a forging, casting, hot-rolled bar, billet, powder metal, and, most recently, directly from 3D printing (additive manufacturing). Depending...

Carburizing, quenching PM gears

Powder metallurgy has been around for hundreds of years, but has only been used for commercialized applications within the last 50 years. And like...

A look at controlled rotation systems

Driverless technology, in its fundamental form, already exists in academia and private consortiums. The basic components are here: GPS can track and sense a...

Proper cooling is paramount

In higher-alloy material, such as precipitation hardening steels (PH), hardening requires a two-step application—one of removing heat by quenching followed by adding heat to...

The evolution of carburizing and quenching

Let’s talk about evolution. I don’t mean Darwin’s escapades on the HMS Beagle, but the evolution that has influenced the development of the OEM...

Dealing with material handling

One of the many things I ask when evaluating a company’s heat treating requirements is how they plan on dealing with material handling. As...

Hardenability and high pressure gas quenching

What do Max the stone-age entrepreneur, Ben Franklin, and your daughter’s hamster have in common? All have contributed indirectly to the latest development in...

A discussion of the 3D heat-treatment process called Direct Metal Laser Sintering

Selling the Wheel, a book by Jeff Cox, tells the story of Max, a stone-age entrepreneur who creates the wheel and is looking to...