Muffle furnaces are often used in wire-drawing mills for annealing and for the production of razor blades and Bundy tubes. The muffle tubes inside such furnaces protect the product during heat treatment and create conditions for more-even temperature distribution.

Here is a complete list of all the feature articles – by topic – that appeared in Industrial Heating in 2020. The month each article appeared in is included. All articles are hyperlinked for your convenience.

Watlow, a designer and manufacturer of complete thermal systems, signed a definitive agreement to sell to Tinicum L.P., a private-equity firm. The deal is expected to close as quickly as reasonably possible pending receipt of customary regulatory approvals. Watlow’s products include a range of industrial heaters, thermocouples, RTDs, power controllers and data loggers. The company’s headquarters will remain in St. Louis, Mo.  

Castalloy’s Product Team picks the top five questions to ask when specifying new heat-treatment fixtures or components.

Graphite Metallizing Corp., manufacturers of self-lubricating Graphalloy bushing materials for industrial applications, announced a record turnaround for a customer with an emergency. A pump repair center contacted the Graphalloy Sales Engineering Team near the end of the business day on a Friday. One of its clients needed a spiral-grooved, Graphalloy nickel-grade pump bushing as soon as possible for outage work. A Graphalloy engineer then went to manufacturing with the bushing dimensions and material specifications. Manufacturing was able to create the bushing, inspection was able to verify the dimensions and shipping was able to ship the part within one hour. The customer received the bushing Saturday morning.

PermaFlex is the newest metal identification tag to be added to the PermaLabel family from InfoSight. PermaFlex is attached to products with adhesive.

When something so disruptive happens that hits daily life in unpredictable ways, adaptability becomes a key element, especially when it comes to business. We have seen many people adopting smart working, as face-to-face meetings and business trips have been replaced by frequent video calls.

If you’re at all like me, you wonder which articles get the most attention on our website. Every year we publish around 45 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. This ranking applies only to articles published in 2020.

Whether for automotive, aerospace or heavy equipment, manufacturers using heat treatment, which can reach temperatures up to 2400°F and vary from a few seconds to over 60 hours, need conveyor belting that can withstand the rigors of the process. However, traditional round balance weave wire belting has changed little in 100 years and often requires annual replacement, causing costly production downtime.

The PBI facility, as part of their planned maintenance period, worked on one of the two reactors late last year. During the cleaning process, high-pressure water damaged one of the bushings on one of the reactors. Two of these specially made GRAPHALLOY® bushings are used in each reactor, which makes the polymer used to produce the fibers at the plant.