When large industrial vacuum brazing furnaces begin to produce customer parts that show discoloration instead of a pristine stainless steel finish or joints where the brazing material has refused to flow properly, production is quickly halted. Easy-to-find-and-fix leaks can take the furnace down for a half of a day, and more downtime is likely.

Brazing furnaces today often contain a lot of very heavy fixturing materials in their brazing chambers. This “fixturing” includes all the heavy-metal structures in the furnace hot zone (e.g., grates, trays, racks, baskets, etc.).

SMS group received an order from voestalpine Böhler Edelstahl to supply an electric-arc furnace (EAF), an AOD converter and secondary metallurgical facilities for the construction of a stainless steel plant in Kapfenberg, Austria. The facility, scheduled to start up in 2021, will produce 205,000 tons of high-performance steels per year for application in the aerospace and automotive industries. The 55-ton EAF will be able to melt high-purity scrap and alloys into liquid steel. The exhaust heat generated during the process will be used to dry the ultra-pure scrap in a separate plant before it is fed to the EAF.