Can-Eng Furnaces International Ltd. has been awarded a contract to deliver a second mesh-belt furnace line to a commercial heat treater in the Midwest. Can-Eng commissioned a 4,000-pound/hour mesh-belt furnace system for this customer in 2020. This duplicate 4,000-pound/hour high-capacity furnace line will be installed alongside the previous furnace line in the company’s recently expanded plant. It will be used primarily for processes including carbonitriding and carburizing. The furnace line includes: an automated bin dumping and vibratory part-feeder system; dunk and spray pre-washer; protective atmosphere-controlled mesh-belt hardening system; oil quench; dunk and spray post-wash system; forced recirculation temper furnace; in-line post-cooling system; and Can-Eng’s PET Level 2 SCADA system.

SECO/WARWICK will supply an electric mesh-belt furnace to bolt manufacturer Solvera Gawel Technology S.A. The line is designed mainly for carbonitriding and hardening processes and for washing and tempering of high-quality screws and other hardware manufactured near Rzeszów, Poland. The process line, which will be delivered in 2022, will be adapted for operating with endothermic atmosphere supplied from an external endothermic generator. It will consist of a loading module equipped with a weighing system, a main furnace, oil bath (for hardening the workpieces), and vibration and reloading tables. After the hardening process, the workpieces are transferred to a drum washer where they are washed, rinsed and dried.

Bodycote, the world’s largest provider of specialist thermal-processing services, announced the opening of a new facility in Syracuse, N.Y. The 60,000-square-foot facility is operational and offers a wide range of heat-treatment processes, including vacuum heat treating, atmospheric carburizing, low-pressure carburizing, carbonitriding, ferritic nitrocarburizing, nitriding and aluminum heat treating. The site is working toward securing all major OEM approvals as well as Nadcap accreditation, which it is on the way to achieving.

Can-Eng Furnaces International Ltd. designed, built and delivered a mesh-belt heat-treatment furnace line to Gallos Metal Solutions of Milwaukee, Wis. The continuous atmosphere system will be used primarily for demanding processing, including carbonitriding and carburizing, while allowing for neutral heat treatment with a production capacity up to 4,000 pounds/hour. This high-capacity furnace line is part of Gallos’ expansion and modernization project, which has more than doubled the existing plant square footage, increased capacity and added automation.

Gas carbonitriding is a modified form of the carburizing process and is not a form of nitriding. In this process, both carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) are introduced into the surface of the steel by introducing ammonia (NH3) and a hydrocarbon enriching gas into the furnace atmosphere in order to add nitrogen to the carburized case as it is being produced.

Service Heat Treating, a commercial heat-treating company located in Milwaukee, Wis., has developed an alternative heat-treatment process known as WearAll that has shown to provide better wear resistance than carbonitriding for a number of critical-service components.

The terms sound alike and often cause confusion, but nitrocarburizing and carbonitriding are distinct heat-treating processes.

Carbonitriding studies with a high amount of nitrogen are characterized by adding ammonia to the process gas at a higher rate than the usual 3-5%. This work focuses on the impact of nitrogen on the lifetime of carburized parts (e.g. gears, sprockets, bearings, crankshafts) exposed to Hertzian pressure or fatigue.