The metal-processing industry faces several challenges affecting business profitability and sustainability.

There was a big announcement out of West Virginia in September that you may have missed. It was particularly big news for the aerospace industry.

Taking these four preventive measures brings uniformity and reliability to heat-treat processes.

This article considers the production deficits, logistics turmoil and demand surges that contributed to supply-chain disruptions that were brought into focus with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Temperature uniformity within a furnace can be defined as: “a uniform temperature set to operate within a specific tolerance band to create conditions under which a final uniform resulting metallurgy will be accomplished in the treated component.”

There are few things that the U.S. Congress does better than nothing. And after being off to a slow start in 2021, Harry Truman’s “do-nothing Congress” label affixed in 1948 was quite apt for this 117th Congress.

During the past few decades, fluidized-bed technology has not lost any of its importance for heat-treatment applications in terms of quality and has even become indispensable in some application niches due to its special properties.

Refractory maintenance, though vital, can often be a logistical and financial burden. This is especially true for large facilities that rely on kilns, coolers, preheater towers and risers for day-to-day operation. These facilities stand to lose upward of $50,000 a day in production if their refractory can’t stand up to the heat.

Many demanding applications require plants to operate at higher temperatures to increase efficiency and/or burn lower-quality fuels. 

A common way to create brazing filler metal (BFM) powder is by melting the raw metallic ingredients for the BFM in a large melting pot using induction heating and then pouring that alloyed liquid metal through a specialized atomization nozzle.