Sulzer opened a laser metal deposition (LMD) facility at its Houston Service Center in La Porte, Texas. The advanced additive-manufacturing process will provide multiple benefits for the company’s turbomachinery repair and upgrade projects. Sulzer’s HICoat Division will offer LMD services for a range of materials. According to Sulzer, LMD creates a metallurgical bond that ensures excellent bonding with parent materials and increased consistency of material density, which is ideal for challenging rotor or shaft repairs.

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.

In 2021, Solar Atmospheres of Western PA reported it was retrofitting a vacuum furnace for use in a new metal injection molding (MIM) and additive manufacturing (AM) binder-removal technology application. The goal was to build a vacuum sintering furnace with a hot zone and pumping technology that would minimize and target the deposit of detrimental binders evaporating out of MIM and AM parts. The furnace has been in production for over a month and produced multiple high-temperature sintering cycles with positive results.

SLM Solutions will join forces with Mahle, a leading automotive supplier, to improve the speed and quality of automotive components in both prototype and serial productions. Mahle will utilize SLM Solution’s systems to empower OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to fulfill their need for metal additive manufacturing (AM) in serial production. The components will be printed with aluminum and stainless steel alloys, which are resilient and resistant to corrosion. Their topology is optimized to reduce overall weight. Structures that are too complex for conventional manufacturing methods are easily produced while still adhering to the strict quality standards of the automotive industry.

Solar Atmospheres of California (SCA) added a small vacuum furnace to support its research-and-development and additive-manufacturing projects. Procured from Solar Manufacturing, SCA’s furnace manufacturing sister facility in Sellersville, Pa., the furnace was specifically designed to process a variety of materials between 600-2400°F (+/-10°F) in both vacuum and/or partial-pressure environments. Precise cooling capability up to 2-Bar in argon, nitrogen or helium is available with a maximum operating temperature of 2650°F (1455°C). The furnace is also equipped with the SolarVac Polaris control system for optimum performance and precise cycle control. 

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ExOne will install a metal 3D-printing system in the Schunk Sinter Metals location in Thale, Germany, to provide serial production of sintered metal parts to automotive, aerospace, medical and other customers throughout Europe – starting with 316L stainless steel and later expanding to other materials. Schunk plans to integrate ExOne’s metal binder-jetting technology into its industrial ecosystem, which already includes other methods of 3D-printing producing parts with different materials such as copper, stainless steel and low-alloyed steel.

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.

Bodycote is expanding its hot isostatic pressing (HIP) capability in Greenville, S.C., by adding two vessels. The new HIP capacity, which will be online in the first half of 2022, will focus on developments in additive manufacturing (AM) and advanced materials. Bodycote’s Greenville site is a Nadcap-accredited and holds several core OEM approvals. The facility includes numerous vacuum furnaces and other capabilities well suited to support AM customers.

Desktop Metal opened a new in-house manufacturing facility in Massachusetts that will more than triple the final assembly space currently dedicated to the Production System metal 3D-printing platform. The facility is part of a strategic plan to accelerate the production ramp of Desktop Metal’s flagship Production System P-50 printer, for which the company is engaged in component procurement and assembly of initial builds targeted for shipment in the fourth quarter of 2021.