Silverchair to provide hosting for ASM’s online materials information resources
May 18, 2018 Source: ASM International
Silverchair Information Systems, Charlottesville, Va., announces a partnership with ASM International, Cleveland, to develop a unified hosting solution for ASM’s authoritative materials information resources.
Continue readingResidual Stress Workshop at Thermal Processing in Motion Conference
May 3, 2018 Source: ASM International
This Workshop will collect information on current gaps relative to designing products and establishing product definitions that include Bulk Residual Stress as a component attribute. Concepts for possible Industry Standards will be proposed to support enhanced product capabilities.
Continue readingLucifer Furnaces builds dual chamber heat treating furnace for punch and die maker
April 16, 2018 Source: ASM International
Lucifer Furnaces, Warrington, Pa., has delivered a dual chamber fiber-lined furnace to a leading manufacturer of punches and dies in North America.
Continue readingPrecision-controlled pit furnace tempers hardened steel dies
January 4, 2017 Source:
Seco Warwick, Meadville, Pa., announces that Dorssers Inc. has purchased two of its pit style air temper furnaces to process pellet dies. The pellet dies are large-diameter, hardened steel dies with a multitude of holes gun-drilled for compressing various feed stocks in the agriculture, waste, and pulp industries. The environment is harsh, so exact heat treating is a must.
ʺWe have worked with Seco Warwick for years, and we know they understand our need for rugged furnaces, along with our need for uniformity and precision controls for our expensive dies," says Dorssers president Peter Timmermans. ʺWe have owned and operated Seco Warwick vacuum furnace equipment for many years, and find the control systems to be one of the best on the market."
Seco Warwick pit furnaces feature a rugged, heavy-duty industrial design for uniform convective heating. The furnaces, sold in two sizes, are offered as electrically heated or gas-fired, with PLC control system and friendly HMI.
Seco Warwick, Meadville, Pa., announces that Dorssers Inc. has purchased two of its pit style air temper furnaces to process pellet dies.
Continue readingLucifer Furnaces dual-chamber furnace heat treats CPM high speed steel
November 23, 2016 Source:
Lucifer Furnaces, Warrington, Pa., reports that it has delivered a dual-chamber high-temperature furnace to Compacting Tooling Inc., McKeesport, Pa., to heat treat Crucible particle metallurgy (CPM) high speed steel tooling. Powered with 42 kW, this furnace is ideal for heat treating high-speed steel, as it reaches 2450°F in the upper chamber and 1200°F in the lower tempering oven.
A combined 6.5 inches of ceramic fiber modules with mineral wood backup insulation allows for faster heating/cooling cycles. Silicon carbide heating elements operate off-the-line through an SCR power supply with a current limiting circuit that automatically adjusts the voltage to elements as their resistance increases, resulting in longer element life.
Heat treating recipes can be stored in the Honeywell digital temperature controllers with a seven-day timer. High limit controllers were added for safety.
CTI, an ISO 9001-2008 certified shop, is a specialized Tool & Die company manufacturing high-quality tooling for the powder compaction industry. CTI does most of its heat treating in-house for faster turnaround. This furnace will supplement the other Lucifer furnaces currently in use.
Lucifer Furnaces, Warrington, Pa., reports that it has delivered a dual chamber high-temperature furnace to Compacting Tooling Inc. (CTI), McKeesport, Pa., to heat treat Crucible particle metallurgy (CPM) high speed steel.
Continue readingSingle-chamber box furnace heat treats mold tooling for die maker
June 27, 2016 Source:
Lucifer Furnaces Inc., Warrington, Pa., announces that Century Die Co. LLC, Fremont, Ohio, has purchased a Lucifer Red Devil single-chamber box furnace for heat treating mold tooling. Model RD7-H21 has a working chamber size of 9x12x21 inches, lined with lightweight firebrick and mineral wool backup insulation. Easy-to-replace heating elements for uniform radiation are situated along both side walls, and heat the furnace to 2200°F.
The furnace features a horizontal swing door and safety microswitch, as well as a ceramic hearth plate to support the workload and protect the floor brick insulation. Century Die engineers chose to accessorize the furnace with a base stand to bring the hearth height to 30 inches. The upgraded Honeywell UDC 2500 controller allows programming up to 12 segments. An additional soak timer with alarm contact alerts the operator when heat treating is complete.
Century Die plans on serving higher customer demands and increasingly shorter lead times by keeping the overnight, and sometimes same day, heat-treat requirements in-house. Many customers are running a 24/7 operation and cannot allow excessive downtime.
Mark Carter from Century Die says he has been very happy with performance of an older dual-chamber Lucifer Furnace space-saver unit, which led the company to select Lucifer Furnaces for its new equipment. In addition to being a leading supplier of blow, compression, and thermoform mold tooling for plastic packaging and components, Century Die is also a major repair and refurbishment facility for this type of tooling.
Lucifer Furnaces Inc., Warrington, Pa., announces that Century Die Co. LLC, Fremont, Ohio, has purchased a Lucifer Red Devil single-chamber box furnace for heat treating mold tooling.
Continue readingIntegral quench furnace system provides solution for die forging heat treatment
June 18, 2016 Source:
Lindberg/MPH, Riverside, Mich., has shipped a Pacemaker integral quench furnace with an endothermic gas generator to a company in the die forging industry. The Pacemaker furnace has a maximum temperature rating of 1850°F and work chamber dimensions of 30x48x30 inches. The integral quench furnace system provides a total solution for the customer's heat treating process.
The furnace utilizes a drive mechanism to push the workload into the furnace where it undergoes hardening under an endothermic gas atmosphere. A discharge drive system pushes the workload out of the furnace and onto a quench elevator. The load is then either lowered into an oil quench tank for fast cooling, or is elevated for a slower atmosphere cool. The endothermic gas generator system supplies the furnace atmosphere ,and features a gas mixing oxygen probe, touch screen displays, and gas to air cooler.
The furnace system is integrated into the customer's present loading system. The furnace features fully automatic movement of the load, which is controlled through an advanced process controller with an HMI display. Equipment status screens are visible on the HMI screen. The controller also performs all data collection functions for process variables.
Atmosphere carbon potential is controlled with automatically adjusting flowmeters and an oxygen probe. Multiple burners fire through single-end radiant tubes to radiate heat onto the workload. Lindberg/MPH provided equipment installation supervision and equipment start-up, which was crried out by factory trained Lindberg/MPH technicians.
Lindberg/MPH, Riverside, Mich., has shipped a Pacemaker integral quench furnace with an endothermic gas generator to a company in the die forging industry.
Continue readingAdvanced Heat Treat completes Phase I of plasma nitriding evaluation
May 21, 2016 Source:
Advanced Heat Treat Corp. (AHT), Waterloo, Iowa, announces that it has completed Phase I of a grant to evaluate plasma nitriding for improved life of forging dies by generating a hard case on tribological surfaces. AHT, along with Ohio State University's Manufacturing Research Group, received a grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration SBIR Program and the Defense Technical Information Center. The grant was issued in August 2015 to research "Plasma Enhanced Nanostructures for Improved Life of Forging Dies," and Phase I was completed on April 30th, 2016.
Forging die failure affects the entire economy of forging companies, including the cost of tooling, repair, press downtimes, and production lead times, to name a few. According to a recent survey, as the batch sizes increase, machine setup costs go down (economy of scale); however, tooling costs rise.
This technological challenge is the prime driver for this proposed research, where plasma-enhanced nanostructured surface treatments will be explored to increase die life by up to five times its current life. Plasma nitriding is widely used to generate a hard case on engineering surfaces for enhanced performance of many tribological components.
Recently, this process has found wider applications in advanced surfaces in aerospace, electronics, and power systems for corrosion protection. In addition, plasma nitrided surfaces are being investigated for the emerging areas of alternate power generation such as fuel cells, and in human implants. The potential impact of this research is not only in the current fields of application, but also in the emerging areas vital to the energy and industrial future of our country.
A summary of the Phase I findings was issued to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) for their review. Those interested in a full copy of the summary should contact Advanced Heat Treat Corp. at 319-232-5221 or submit requests online at www.ahtweb.com using a "quick contact" form.
Advanced Heat Treat Corp. (AHT), Waterloo, Iowa, announces that it has completed Phase I of a grant to evaluate plasma nitriding for improved life of forging dies by generating a hard case on tribological surfaces.
Continue readingOne Minute Mentor: Heat Treatment of a Premium Grade H13 Die
February 4, 2016 Source:
The graph shows a continuous cooling test in which the austenitizing temperature was approximately 1040°C (1900°F). It shows the effect of intermediate cooling rates on the microstructure and toughness of H13 tool steel austenitized at 1075°C (1970°F). (a) Continuous cooling transformation (CCT diagram) shows variation in microstructure with varying cooling rates. (b) Variation in toughness as a function of carbides ejected from austenite. Hardness was maintained at a constant value.
Hot-work die steels containing 5% Cr are normally used (H13 is the most common in the United States) because they have:
• A good combination of toughness and strength for safety and service
• Good hardenability in thick sections
• Good hot hardness and strength to resist cyclic stressing at operating temperatures up to 400 °C (750 °F)
• Good resistance to tempering during service that gradually lowers the surface hardness and the fatigue strength
Carbide precipitation, other than that produced during tempering, is known to be deleterious to the fatigue life of H13 tool steel. Fast quenching rates required to suppress intermediate precipitation of carbides (such as proeutectoid grain-boundary carbide, pearlite, or bainite) also produce large thermal gradients within the tool. Fast quenching rates can cause distortion or even cracking. The larger the tool, the greater the risk of cracking.
Volume 4D, Heat Treating of Irons and Steels ⇒ Tool Steels ⇒ Heat Treating of Hot-Work Tool Steels ⇒ Examples of Heat-Treating Procedure for Hot-Work Tools
The graph shows a continuous cooling test in which the austenitizing temperature was approximately 1040°C (1900°F).
Continue readingOne Minute Mentor: Heat Treating of Hot-Work Tool Steels
January 15, 2016 Source:
The ability of a given grade of hot-work tool steel to maintain hardness for a prolonged time at high temperatures is called tempering resistance. A simple comparison of tempering resistance may be performed by analyzing tempering curves such as those shown in the graph. Higher tempering resistance is related to curves dislocated to the right. High mechanical strength at high temperature is fundamental for hot-work steels.
Toughness in hot-work tools is an essential property for avoiding the cracks and fractures that can be common in normal working conditions. Unexpected and very unstable in cold-work tools, cracks may be encountered after a given operation time for hot-work dies. The most important example is fine crack networks, large in number but small in length, observed on a tool surface after the tooling operation. This kind of cracking is known as heat checking and is typically found in die-casting dies as well as in forging dies or other hot-work tools. The cause is thermal fatigue at the tool surface, caused in turn by repeated temperature fluctuations (heating and cooling) during tool operation.
Depending on the intensity, heat checking can lead to tool failure, which is typically the case in die-casting cavities. In such situations, the casting metal, normally aluminum, enters into the heat-checking cracks, making part extractions difficult or impairing part surface quality. In cases of a lack of toughness, gross cracking may also occur, leading to complete loss of the working tool.
Volume 4D, Heat Treating of Irons and Steels -> Tool Steels -> Heat Treating of Hot-Work Tool Steels-> Introduction
The ability of a given grade of hot-work tool steel to maintain hardness for a prolonged time at high temperatures is called tempering resistance.
Continue reading