Hard lessons learned from the 2020 pandemic taught us that we needed to rebuild and re-establish our U.S. supply-chain ecosystem. The systemic shock to our global supply chains left us with bottlenecks, shortages and an acute awareness of our overdependence on imports.

Solar Atmospheres of Western PA recently took occupancy of a new 15,000-square-foot connector building that joins the 80,000-square-foot workspace, which houses some of the largest vacuum furnaces in the world, to the 10,000-square-foot Nadcap laboratory, testing building and vacuum oil quenching building. The primary purpose of the new building is to create a clear and defined flow of work using a pull-push system rather than having incoming and outgoing jobs combined in front of heat-treating equipment. All incoming jobs will now be “pulled” from this building, and completed jobs will be “pushed” back to a designated outbound area. The new space will serve as a conduit for transfer of materials from production to final testing.

The Vanta iX in-line X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyzer automates material analysis and alloy ID on the manufacturing line to deliver instant results for real-time process monitoring and 100% inspection.

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.

The D-100 model infrared conveyor oven is designed for laboratory testing and low-volume production applications.

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.

Solar Atmospheres of Western PA (SAWPA) successfully achieved Nadcap AC7101/4 accreditation for its captive metallography laboratory and became an approved Boeing Process Source (D1-4426). The accreditation will allow SAWPA to test for microhardness, surface contamination, intergranular oxidation and grain size in accordance with various aerospace specifications, including many Boeing process specifications. Furthermore, the accreditation will reduce SAWPA’s dependence on outside testing facilities and provide its customers with a single-source supplier capable of meeting all testing needs internally. Along with the laboratory accreditation, SAWPA continued the 24-month merit status for Nadcap heat treating.

A similar incident two years prior prompted the engine’s manufacturer, CFM International, to recommend inspections of fan blades on CFM56-7B engines with 20,000 cycles. All told, the FAA and CFM bulletins covered approximately 3,160 engines, or 76,320 separate fan blades.

Olympus, a manufacturer of nondestructive testing (NDT) solutions, supplied Hellier’s Houston, Texas, location with advanced NDT inspection equipment. The OmniScan X3 phased-array flaw detector with FMC/TFM and other Olympus instruments will be used to train the next generation of inspectors in ultrasonic testing (UT). Hellier provides NDT training and Level III services. At its locations around the United States, the company offers classroom, online and blended training, as well as NDT auditing and consulting. Olympus’ equipment enables students to work with the latest NDT technologies and software while adhering to most company and industry standards.

Industrial Heating, during a Q&A session at FNA 2020, announced that it will support the Reshoring Initiative with a $2,500 sponsorship. The mission of the Reshoring Initiative is to bring good, well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the United States by assisting companies to more accurately assess their total cost of offshoring and to shift collective thinking from offshoring is cheaper to local reduces the total cost of ownership. As part of this new relationship, the Reshoring Initiative will provide Industrial Heating with editorial content throughout 2021.