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.

A new line of powder products can be bundled with advanced engineering services to assist customers in achieving optimal results for specialty metal additive-manufacturing (AM) applications.

Swedish heating technology company Kanthal and metals research institute Swerim will invest in ultra-modern atomizing equipment. The investment is worth approximately $2.39 million. The new equipment is designed for research and development of both materials and the atomizing process in the area of powder metallurgy (PM). It allows for atomizing of powder batches up to about 187 pounds (85 kg), both for additive manufacturing (AM) and hot isostatic pressing (HIP) applications. The unit has high material and process flexibility, which means great possibilities in development of materials and processes aiming toward both AM and PM.

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.

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.

Liberty Powder Metals, part of the GFG Alliance, started commercial production at its new Teesside powder-metals facility, targeting fast-growing demand from the 3D-printing industry. The company will produce a range of stainless steel and nickel superalloy powders for precision components in the automotive, aerospace and engineering industries. Minute spherical powder particles are processed to the highest specifications in a vacuum induction argon gas atomizer, which Liberty Powder Metals says is the only one of its kind in the U.K.

When you think of all the ways to join metals, friction stir welding probably isn’t the first concept that pops into your head. This is especially true if you use powder metallurgy.

G-M Enterprises, a Nitrex company, received a multimillion-dollar order from a global manufacturer of metal injection molding (MIM) products for two horizontal vacuum furnaces. These 2-bar sintering furnaces have a work area measuring 36 inches wide x 30 inches high x 84 inches long (900 x 762 x 2,100 mm), a 4,400-pound weight capacity, a maximum operating temperature of 2600°F (1430°C) and uniformity of +/- 10°F (+/- 5.5°C). A multistage debinder trap system designed to thermally extract binder from the parts is integral to the vacuum system. Sintering and debinding occur in a single cycle using a unique system design that is optimized to handle the maximum designed load capacity. Consequently, there is never a need to operate below the rated load capacity to achieve the required part quality.

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.

It is a well-known fact that too many recordable safety incidents will result in the good people from OSHA showing up to hang around and ask a lot of questions. Nobody wants to get hurt on the job. Everyone at the facility has some other place to be once their shift is over, and many employees have family waiting for them. With that being said, why would people continue to operate poorly maintained manufacturing equipment and material-handling machinery?