EPS President Ken Klein’s article discussing tips and tools for choosing the right oven was featured this month in Process Heating Magazine, a well known resource for manufacturing engineers who use heat processing equipment and supplies, including product, design and plant engineers.

The article focuses on not only what to look for, but also what to avoid when choosing an industrial oven that will be designed specifically for the application. Customers with clear requirements, Ken points out, are the easiest to understand and to provide the proper oven for their needs:

“Oven building can be a challenging enterprise, especially where large industrial ovens are concerned.”

Included in Ken’s list of items to think about? Crucial items like airflow and rate of rise rank high on the list. These will influence things like efficiency and recovery time down the road.

EPS Ovens has been providing industrial and pharmaceutical oven solutions since 1978, and now offers its own line of batch and continuous ovens for industrial applications. Learn more about our custom industrial ovens, including EPS batch curing ovens, industrial heat treat ovens, industrial drying ovens, composite curing ovens and more.

In fact, the steel, now trademarked as Flash Bainite, has tested stronger and more shock-absorbing than the most common titanium alloys used by industry. Now the entrepreneur is working with researchers at Ohio State University to better understand the science behind the new treatment, called flash processing.

What they’ve discovered may hold the key to making cars and military vehicles lighter, stronger, and more fuel-efficient.

In the current issue of the journal Materials Science and Technology, the inventor and his Ohio State partners describe how rapidly heating and cooling steel sheets changes the microstructure inside the alloy to make it stronger and less brittle.

The basic process of heat-treating steel has changed little in the modern age, and engineer Suresh Babu is one of few researchers worldwide who still study how to tune the properties of steel in detail. He’s an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State, and Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Integrative Materials Joining for Energy Applications, headquartered at the university.

“Steel is what we would call a ‘mature technology.’ We’d like to think we know most everything about it,” he said. “If someone invented a way to strengthen the strongest steels even a few percent, that would be a big deal. But 7 percent? That’s huge.”

Yet, when inventor Gary Cola initially approached him, Babu didn’t know what to think. “The process that Gary described – it shouldn’t have worked,” he said. “I didn’t believe him. So he took my students and me to Detroit.”

Cola showed them his proprietary lab setup at SFP Works, LLC., where rollers carried steel sheets through flames as hot as 1100 degrees Celsius and then into a cooling liquid bath. Though the typical temperature and length of time for hardening varies by industry, most steels are heat-treated at around 900 degrees Celsius for a few hours. Others are heated at similar temperatures for days.

Cola’s entire process took less than 10 seconds.

He claimed that the resulting steel was 7 percent stronger than martensitic advanced high-strength steel. [Martensitic steel is so named because the internal microstructure is entirely composed of a crystal form called martensite.] Cola further claimed that his steel could be drawn – that is, thinned and lengthened – 30 percent more than martensitic steels without losing its enhanced strength.

If that were true, then Cola’s steel could enable car makers to build frames that are up to 30 percent thinner and lighter without compromising safety. Or, it could reinforce an armored vehicle without weighing it down.

“We asked for a few samples to test, and it turned out that everything he said was true,” said Ohio State graduate student Tapasvi Lolla. “Then it was up to us to understand what was happening.”

Cola is a self-taught metallurgist, and he wanted help from Babu and his team to reveal the physics behind the process – to understand it in detail so that he could find ways to adapt it and even improve it.

Original Source: A New Way to Make Lighter, Stronger Steel – In A Flash

Removing residual stress is a time/temperature related event with a very controlled cooling cycle using your Cress Furnace. If not carried out correctly, new residual stresses can be produced that will result in greater stresses than the part had originally. To remove stresses it is recommended that you consult the mill literature for the grade of metal to determine what the Ac1 temperature is for your application. There are several methods to remove stresses successfully, but the most commonly used method is heat treat stress relief. The main criteria to use for choosing the correct temperature is to heat below the lower austenizing temperature (Ac1). Decarburization will take place above 960oF, so protect the surfaces if the surface is not going to be removed by machining.

Thus, if we have a 4140 steel part, (4140 has a 1380oF Ac1) that we want to stress relieve, we could place it in our Cress furnace, take it up to 1100oF and soak it for 6 hours, followed by controlled cooling at a rate of lowering it at 50 to 75oF per hour, in a closed furnace, to below 400oF, at which point it can be removed from the furnace, and it would be stress relieved. However, if you heated it to 1300oF, you can soak it for just an hour, followed by the controlled cooling and also stress relieve the part.