Registration is open for IHEA’s Fundamentals of Industrial Process Heating online learning course, which begins October 24 and runs for six weeks. Throughout the online course, students learn safe, efficient operation of industrial heating equipment, how to reduce energy consumption and ways to improve the bottom line. The curriculum includes the basics of heat transfer, fuels and combustion, energy use, furnace design, refractories, automatic control, and atmospheres as applied to industrial process heating.

PRCO America Inc. began production at its refractories manufacturing plant in Mayfield, Ky., in August 2022. At full production, the plant – the company’s first in the United States – will produce 50,000-60,000 tons of resin-bonded refractory products for the steelmaking industry annually and employ approximately 50 people. The facility will produce resin-bonded magnesia carbon, resin-bonded magnesia-alumina-carbon and resin-bonded alumina refractory ceramic shapes used to line steel-processing furnaces.  

Challenges facing annealing operations include rising energy and raw material costs, operations crew turnover and supply-chain constraints. How can the virtual world of the IIoT help operators cope with these real-world challenges? This webinar, hosted by Industrial Heating September 15 at 2:00 p.m. (EDT), will discuss how a cloud-based data management and advisory system conserves resources by moving away from a set-it-and-forget-it mode. See how real-time correction of abnormal furnace conditions with algorithms processing furnace data in the cloud optimizes furnace economics.
 

We have been helping thermal-processing companies operate their critical and demanding heat environments by providing dependable safe refractory solutions for more than a century.

The year-over-year U.S. inflation rate through February 2022 hit a 40-year high of 7.9%, eroding purchasing power especially for gas, food and rent.

HarbisonWalker International (HWI) announced that its Alabama One (AL1) manufacturing facility for steel customers in the southern United States is on schedule to open before the end of 2022. HWI is investing approximately $25 million to convert its closed property in Fairfield, Ala., into AL1, a manufacturing, service and distribution hub. Production will initially add approximately 15,000 metric tons annually and ultimately up to 30,000 metric tons as additional equipment is added by 2023. The 200,000-square-foot facility will produce refractories expressly designed for use in low-emission electric-arc furnaces (EAFs). It will produce magnesia-carbon brick for servicing steel ladles, using core raw materials that can be sized accordingly for a full range of steelmaking refractory needs.

In the middle of the last century, a scientist employed by the Carborundum Company fulfilled the industrialized market requirements for a low-thermal-mass insulation material.

Here is a complete list of all the feature articles – by topic – that appeared in Industrial Heating in 2021. The month each article appeared in is included. All articles are hyperlinked for your convenience.

In refractory lining maintenance, recommendations for repairs and relines often consist of selecting a similar or equivalent material to replace the original. Sometimes that’s sufficient.

If you’re at all like me, you wonder which articles get the most attention on our website. Every year we publish over 40 feature articles, and at the end of the year we gather statistics to see which ones get the most page views. So, without further ado, here are the five most-viewed articles on www.industrialheating.com based on page views in 2021. This ranking applies only to articles published in 2021.