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.

Industrial Heating is hosting three free webinars over the next three weeks, including two in the next couple of days. “Users of Industrial Hydrogen Look Beyond Delivered for Security of Supply” will be held tomorrow, November 30, at 11:00 a.m. (EST). “How to Help Your Customers Decide to Reshore” will be held Thursday, December 2, at 2:00 p.m. (EST), and “Grinding and Polishing of Sample Materials for Microstructural Analysis and Hardness Testing” will be held Tuesday, December 14, at 2:00 p.m. (EST). Registration for these webinars is free.

Registration for IHEA’s Fundamentals of Industrial Process Heating Online Learning Course is now open. Scheduled to begin January 17, 2022, the six-week class will run through February 27. The flexible online format and interactive forums are just some of the benefits of this class. 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. Weekly coursework, quizzes and a final-exam project are administered to guide students on their progress and evaluate their knowledge of the material.

Selecting a burner that meets emissions targets is imperative and requires a thorough understanding of the solutions available today.

This month, we pick up or discussion where we left off in August. If you missed that part of the discussion, check it out in the August issue (View Part 1).

ASM International and AGMA are committed to holding the 31^st Heat Treating Society Conference and Exposition (Heat Treat 2021) and the Motion + Power Technology Expo September 14-16 in St. Louis, Mo., and will not be canceling the events. Members want a platform to conduct business face‐to‐face, and it is our job to support that with our conferences and trade shows. The top priority remains the health and safety of all those who support the event on‐site. We have protocols in place and are working with America's Center Convention Complex, the city of St. Louis and our vendor partners to provide a safe environment for a successful in‐person event.

In our final IH Rx Podcast, Dan Herring and I covered some readers’ questions about carburizing. We transcribed and edited that podcast into a two-part article, which is seen here and will continue in the September issue.

Does your manufacturing facility have a smoke stack? If it does, your facility also likely contains a valve train, commonly known in industrial circles as a “gas train” or a “fuel train.” This complicated series of piping and components requires annual inspections, accurate record keeping and preventive maintenance to avert productivity issues.

Air Liquide and Jiangsu Shagang Group, the largest private steel enterprise in China, signed a long-term agreement for the supply of industrial gases in Jiangsu Province, China. Air Liquide will invest approximately $118 million to build an air-separation unit (ASU) on the site, where it already operates two other ASUs. Under a 20-year contract, Air Liquide will build, own and operate the ASU, which has a daily capacity of 3,800 metric tons of oxygen. The company says it will be the largest single ASU for the steel industry in the world. When it starts up at the end of 2023, it will bring the total installed oxygen capacity to over 8,000 metric tons per day on the site.

Given the thousands of boilers, furnaces and ovens currently in use worldwide, the potential of a combustion system malfunctioning is ever-present, especially as these systems grow in scale and complexity. Add to this a single-point failure, and an unqualified operator could inadvertently render a critical fuel system inoperable.