Wisconsin Oven, East Troy, WI, has announced the shipment of a gas-fired walk-in batch oven to a prominent manufacturer in the defense industry. The oven is designed for curing filament wound composite materials and is capable of processing a 78,000-pound load on a 40-foot long mandrel carried by a load car.
The work chamber measures 10 feet wide, 42 feet long, and 9 feet high, with a qualified work zone of 8 feet by 40 feet by 8 feet. The oven includes a rotation system to prevent drooping of uncured composites during the heating process, offering speed control flexibility through a variable frequency drive.
This oven operates at a maximum temperature of 500°F, with temperature uniformity of ±10°F at multiple setpoints. Equipped with a PLC-based Wisconsin Oven Premium Control System and an IoT system, it allows for real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and remote fault diagnosis.
Additional features include split-line construction for easier shipping, two powerful recirculation blowers, interior lighting, and safety-compliant railings and ladder access.
A review from the School of Engineering and Technology, India, describes the increasing demand for cutting-edge materials with a high strength-to-weight ratio and economic considerations. Lightweight materials such as aluminum (Al) and its alloys are attractive, but some properties such as low thermal stability and high wear rate limit the application of aluminum alloys (AA) to some extent. Many researchers have developed various composites to get around these restrictions and increase the performance of aluminum and its alloy. Metal matrix composites (MMCs) with nanoparticles have revealed greater mechanical and tribological properties compared with micron-sized reinforcements. This review summarizes the latest developments in this field.
Cold-walled (double-walled water-cooled) systems were the first generation of plasma nitriding furnaces. This technology is also a vacuum-based process but employs the principle of glow discharge to provide energy for heating and nitriding at one time. Therefore, the independent control of the temperature stability and the nitriding intensity is not possible because both processes are using the same energy source—the plasma.
The hot-wall plasma nitriding furnaces, the next generation of cold-wall ion nitriding systems, are mainly used and built now. This system ensures optimal nitriding quality by fulfilling the highest demands on temperature and nitriding process control. The big advantage of this technology is the separation of the control of the heating and the plasma nitriding parameters. The heating and temperature control of hot-wall plasma nitriding furnaces is realized by several independent heating/cooling zones, which guarantees optimal temperature homogeneity
For more information, click on the link below (subscription required). Then scroll to Figure 26.
R Schneider; R. Mesquita; H. Altena; T. Müller; P. Seemann, Processes and Furnace Equipment for Heat Treating of Tool Steels, ASM International, 2014, https://doi.org/10.31399/asm.hb.v04d.a0005958
Circular economy thinking in heat treatment of nonferrous metals
BlueTechnology takes into account the importance of sustainability for production lines and raises awareness of ethical and ecological metal production. Within the confines of thermodynamics, mass and heat transfer, as well as economics.
Seco/Vacuum, Meadville, Pa., has sold two new Vector single chamber high-pressure quench vacuum to the Australian defense industry through HTA. These will go to the Melbourne and Sydney commercial heat treatment facilities to provide expanded processing capabilities.
HighT-Tech, Md., has won The Spinoff Prize 2021 for developing a technique to make alloys that could improve catalysts or be used to build better batteries. The method enables the startup to fine-tune the catalytic activity of the materials and discover new and potentially more efficient catalysts.
The U.S. Department of Energy has a team of researchers exploring how a weld is put together atom by atom in order to unlock the key to making crack-free welds. The goal is to investigate the performance of welds used to build large thermal energy storage tanks at concentrating solar plants—facilities with vast networks of mirrors used to collect solar energy, some stretching several million square feet in size.
JSW Steel USA, Baytown, Texas, announces plans to invest up to $500 million to install the most technologically advanced and eco-friendly hot-end facility in the world, setting a new industry standard.
Seco Warwick enables constant control of temperature in multi-chamber heat-treat furnaces
March 14, 2017
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Seco Warwick, Meadville, Pa., announces that its engineering team has designed an innovative way to continuously control the heating and cooling of the entire cycle in multi-chamber heat treating furnaces. The company says that this is a unique technological solution on a global scale that could revolutionize the heat treatment process and exceed the aerospace sector's standards.
"All of our customers set the bar high," says Katarzyna Sawka, Global Marketing Director. "Nevertheless, the aerospace industry sets the bar the highest."
The patented solution, designed to meet the highest AMS standard, is based on thermocouples that move between chambers during the heat treatment cycle. Temperature control is achieved based on a special construction that allows the operator to monitor the temperature in both chambers. This provides full temperature control of the processed parts in multi-chamber vacuum furnaces during the entire process.
The technology has already been successfully implemented in a two-chamber vacuum furnace, the CaseMaster Evolution, which enables precise vacuum case-hardening for the most challenging industries. It has been successful in applications for aerospace, automotive, machinery, wind energy, and commercial heat treating facilities.
In 2016, Seco Warwick received a number of prestigious awards and nominations. The company won the Symbol of Innovation 2016, for implementing research and development projects with technical universities, and for developing an innovative graphene production line. Seco Warwick was also one of the first companies in the world to introduce augmented reality technology into heavy industry (SECO/LENS).
Seco Warwick, Meadville, Pa., announces that its engineering team has designed an innovative technology for continuous control over the heating and cooling of the entire cycle in multi-chamber furnaces.
University at Buffalo receives $2.9 million for modeling/simulations lab
October 28, 2016
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The University at Buffalo, N.Y., has received a $2.9 million National Science Foundation grant to transform the traditional role of a database as a repository for information into an automated computer laboratory that rapidly collects, interprets, and learns from massive amounts of information.
The lab, which also will conduct large-scale materials modeling and simulations based upon untapped troves of visual data, will be accessible to the scientific community and ultimately speed up and reduce the cost of discovering, manufacturing and commercializing new materials.
"This pioneering and multidisciplinary approach to advanced materials research will provide the scientific community with tools it needs to accelerate the pace of discovery, leading to greater economic security and a wide range of societal benefits," said Venu Govindaraju, PhD, UB's vice president for research and economic development.
Dr. Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is the grant's principal investigator. Co-principal investigators, all from UB, are: Krishna Rajan, ScD, Erich Bloch Endowed Chair of the Department of Materials Design and Innovation (MDI); Thomas Furlani, PhD, director of the Center for Computational Research; Srirangaraj "Ranga" Setlur, principal research scientist; and Scott Broderick, PhD, research assistant professor in MDI.
The award, from NSF's Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBS) program, draws upon UB's expertise in artificial intelligence, specifically its groundbreaking work that began in the 1980s to enable machines to read human handwriting. The work has saved postal organizations billions of dollars in the U.S. and worldwide.
UB will use the DIBBS grant to create what it is calling the Materials Data Engineering Laboratory at UB (MaDE @UB). The lab will introduce the tools of machine intelligence -- such as machine learning, pattern recognition, materials informatics and modeling, high-performance computing and other cutting-edge technologies -- to transform data libraries into a laboratory that not only stores and searches for information, but also predicts and processes information to discover advanced materials.
The University at Buffalo, N.Y., has received a $2.9 million National Science Foundation grant to transform the traditional role of a database as a repository for information into an automated computer laboratory that rapidly collects, interprets, and learns from massive amounts of information.
