A woman-owned metal stamping company with heat treating capabilities serving a broad range of industries, including automotive, aerospace, energy, medical and general manufacturing, has recently launched as a new entity following a limited asset purchase of a 50-year-old manufacturing company in Downers Grove, Illinois.
Cheryl Wellman, company owner and president, Integrity Manufacturing Inc.
Integrity Manufacturing Inc., which also provides a job shop and assembly work for multiple industries obtained a great limited asset/limited liability agreement with Lindy Manufacturing. Integrity opens its doors with an established customer base and expanded services, two additional plants in Chicago and one in Los Angeles.
"The trend of women in manufacturing is growing, and it reflects on the fact that women are at the forefront of how the market is changing," said Cheryl Wellman, company owner and president, originally a key player at Lindy Manufacturing. "Manufacturers are more than providers of goods: we also advise and support our customers, and that allows for long-term relationships and the development of customized solutions."
Both Wellman and Integrity's vice president, Holly Barajas, held multiple positions within Lindy Manufacturing and worked closely on projects from beginning to end. She oversaw all aspects of production, shipping, and customer service, in addition to marketing and plant management. The decision to create the new company included joining forces with another Lindy Manufacturing employee, Sean Stack, who currently serves as Integrity's General Manager.
"Our goal for Integrity is to take American manufacturing to a new level," says Wellman. "That means putting a priority on quality and innovation, giving our employees the training and support they need and working collaboratively with both them and our clients."
Integrity Manufacturing Inc's management team: Holly Barajas, vice-president; Cheryl Wellman, president and owner; Sean Stack, general manager
It’s frustrating enough for furnace operators to encounter downtime due to failure or faulty equipment, but more so when it can be avoided adhering to basic maintenance procedures and adopting habits of diligence and quick thinking.
Andrew Alborghetti of TAV Vacuum Furnaces offers “5 tips for preventing faults caused by the process water in the cooling system [of a vacuum furnace or by] the use of unsuitable equipment.” In addition, he suggests steps to take when an emergency develops.
In a nutshell,
Maintain specific purity standards of the process water.
Prevent dangerous enrichment by maintaining valves.
Keep an eye on your process water temperature.
Avoid damage from external cold temperatures.
Consider investing in a closed circuit adiabaticwater cooling system.
An excerpt:
“For the vacuum furnace to meet the considerable need for water it must have sufficient capacity (tub or tank) to quickly transfer heat from the furnace and from the load. The capacity of the tank determines the size of the system for cooling the water contained in it. Of course, the bigger the tank, the smaller the water cooling system it contains. When there are numerous furnaces, the size of the tank is calculated based on averaged values for behavior in the respective heat cycles.” ~ TAV Vacuum Furnaces
Click below for more on the 5 tips as well as steps you can take should your shop face an emergency such as a power outage that affects the water cooling system
A corporation based in Richmond, Virginia, that produces metals equipment for a broad range of manufacturing applications recently announced that it was awarded an $8 million tubing order.
Bristol Metals LLC, a subsidiary of Synalloy Corporation, has begun shipment of the product from its Bristol, Tennessee, and Munhall, Pennsylvania, facilities. The company stated that this is the single largest order of its type that Bristol Metals has received since being acquired by Synalloy.
Synalloyengages in a number of diverse business activities including the production of stainless steel pipe and tubing, galvanized pipe and tubing, fiberglass and steel storage tanks, specialty chemicals and the master distribution of seamless carbon pipe and tubing.
From an article provided by the Office of Technology Commercialization and Partnerships and published at Tech Briefs, heat treaters and other students of metal alloys can glean valuable information about hardface coating systems developed to protect from and build resistance to high wear deterioration, weak interfacial bonding, and corrosion.
In applications ranging from sports equipment to turbine blades, and power-generating surfaces to military hardware,
“Metal alloys, such as titanium alloys and steels, are known to have a good combination of mechanical properties for many structural applications, but these metal alloys do not meet the wear and corrosion resistance requirements for some structural applications. . . . To overcome these shortcomings and provide high wear- and corrosion-resistant surfaces on metal alloy substrates, surface alloying and reactive surface modification have been developed — depositing and post-heat-treating a unique combination of materials, selected based upon the substrate material and specific application environment.” ~ Tech Briefs
A Canadian commercial heat treater has expanded their heat treatment production capability with the purchase of two furnaces, installed at the company’s newly built manufacturing facility in Chateauguay (suburb Montreal) and to be used for general heat treating.
Tracy Dougherty, sales manager at AFC-Holcroft
Thermetco of Montreal, the largest commercial heat treater in Quebec, purchased a new UBQ (Universal Batch Quench) furnace and a new UBT (Universal Batch Temper) furnaces from Michigan-based industrial furnace manufacturer AFC-Holcroft to serve customers in the automotive, aerospace, energy and petrochemical industries. The equipment offers the capability of providing metallurgical processes such as carburizing, carbonitriding, annealing, tempering, stress relieving, and other processes.
“The Thermetco team has a history of building thermal processing equipment in the past and were able to quickly identify many of the key factors that make the UBQ an industry leader, including recovery rates, maintainability, Batchmaster™ controls, Remote Diagnostics™, energy saving high/low endo flow, multiple speed quench, etc.,” said Tracy Dougherty, sales manager at AFC-Holcroft. “This order marks the first purchase of AFCHolcroft equipment by Thermetco. We’re very excited about the opportunity to be a part of the Thermetco expansion plans.”
A Belgian stainless steel producer recently contracted with a plant supplier to the metallurgical industry to provide an annealing and pickling line for stainless steel cold strip.
SMS group will deliver the line to Aperam Stainless at its Genk plant in Belgium. Production start is scheduled for 2020. With this investment in state-of-the-art and future-oriented plant technology, Aperam will enlarge its product range by material grades for the most demanding applications and improve lead time and flexibility to meet the market demand.
The line will be equipped with a horizontal Drever annealing furnace and a multi-stage pickling section in addition to a four-high skin-pass mill stand and a side trimmer. The new annealing and pickling line will be the fourth one SMS group is going to install at Aperam’s Genk site.
The line will process both austenitic and ferritic grades.
Running a heat treat shop is more than just firing up a furnace to treat components; it’s doing so in a way that is both efficient and safe.
Today’s Technical Tuesday is a helpful article from Control Engineering about burners for gas-fired heat treating furnaces, their differences and how they are best utilized in different heat treating applications, technological advances in controls engineering, and combustion safety. The article draws on the skills and knowledge of several in the industry who have contributed to the advances and development in burner manufacturing, operation, and safety.
A couple of excerpts:
“With a careful engineering analysis, it often is possible to obtain more efficiency by optimizing either process or system control. As an added benefit, in many cases, such optimization does not require substantial physical hardware upgrades.” ~ Michael Cochran, marketing engineer, combustion systems at Bloom Engineering Company Inc.
“The goal of both regenerative and recuperative designs is to capture heat energy that would otherwise be wasted.” ~ Control Engineering
The next phase in development has begun in the construction of the nation’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford,
The vessel returned to the Newport News, Virginia, shipyard recently for planned upgrades and repairs, including addressing problems involving the gear that’s used to catch fighter jets as they land and a ship propulsion problem that was created by a manufacturing defect.
A Dover, Ohio, engineering consultant group and manufacturer of custom automated machine equipment recently broke ground on a 25,000 sq ft design and manufacturing facility to expand their operations.
Gemini Industrial Machine Group, LLC, expects to open the facility in the spring of 2019, according to Jason Johnson, president of Gemini.
“Basically, we build equipment for area manufacturers,” said Johnson. “So they come to us with needs in automation or specialized equipment inside their facilities. We take that, and our engineers get to work, design it. We build it. We test it — everything in-house. And then I deliver it as well. It can be something as simple as a custom metal bracket or a fully automated robot that can process 20,000 parts in a shift and run millions of parts annually.”
This is the first of three articles by metallurgist Marc Glasser on three individual heat resistant alloys. This article will feature RA 253 MA. Please submit your questions about heat-resistant alloys for Marc to editor@heattreattoday.com.
Alloy 253MA®, marketed in the United States as RA 253 MA®, is a unique stainless steel. It exhibits oxidation resistance to 2000°F. It has shown useful creep resistance in some high-temperature vacuum applications up to 2100°F. Since it is a stainless steel, it is more economical than heat-resistant alloys with higher nickel content. In addition, RA 253 MA exhibits higher creep strength than most heat-resistant alloys with higher nickel content. This alloy is one of the few alloys with measured creep strength up to and above 2000°F.
The Chemistry of RA 253 MA
The chemistry of RA 253 MA is shown in Table 1. The alloy contains additions of silicon and the rare earth metal, cerium, which together create a very adherent oxide up to temperatures between 1950°F and 2000°F. Furthermore, the nitrogen addition enhances the creep strength.
Table 1: RA 253 MA Chemistry
At first glance, RA 253 MA is similar to 309, in terms of chromium and nickel content. However, the silicon and cerium additions enhance the oxidation resistance and the nitrogen boosts the creep strength to more than triple that of 309 and 310 stainless steels at 1800°F. Above 1800°F, 309, 310, RA330, and 600 no longer exhibit usable creep strength, whereas RA 253 MA continues to exhibit usable creep strength up to temperatures of between 2000°F and 2100°F. Table 2 shows the creep properties (1% in 10,000 hours or 0.0001%) of RA 253 MA and other heat resistant materials.
Table 2: Creep Rates for RA 253 MA and Other Heat Resistant Materials
Average Stress, ksi, for 0.0001% per hour Minimum Creep Rate
The Implications in Light of the Performance
In practical terms, the implications of this performance include:
The ability to design parts and fixtures from thinner sections, thus reducing weights significantly, through proper engineering and design.
The ability to design and fabricate fixtures that can hold more weight per furnace load compared to a fixture of the same dimensions with a lesser alloy.
The relatively low nickel content of the alloy, allowing the material to be used successfully in OXIDIZING sulfur atmospheres.
RA 253 MA is best suited for high-temperature structural parts that will see oxidizing, inert, or vacuum environments. Other factors to be cognizant of when considering RA 253 AM include:
The alloy is a stainless steel and therefore subject to sigma phase embrittlement in the temperature range of 1150°F to 1600°F. This means that, over time, the intermetallic sigma phase can form. Sigma phase is quite brittle at room temperature. At operating temperature, the material is still ductile and usable. However, if sigma forms and the material cools to room temperature, care must be taken not to allow any shock impact. A sudden, hard impact from a forklift would be an example of such a shock impact that could break an embrittled basket. Once reheated to operating temperature, the brittleness is not a concern.
The oxidation resistance in wet (water vapor) environments decreases.
The alloy is not resistant to carburization or nitriding.
The alloy does not hold up in reducing sulfur environments.
Conclusion
In summary, RA 253 MA is an excellent choice for environments where a combination of oxidation resistance and superior creep strength are required. Its excellent creep strength allows for the fabrication of either lighter weight or higher weight capacity fixtures and components in high heat applications. Its high strength and higher nickel content compared to ferritic stainless steels make this grade worthy of consideration for automotive exhaust applications.
Even though RA 253 MA has a significantly higher price per pound than the current ferritic chromium-iron alloys, the high creep strength allows for lighter, thinner components, while nominal 11% nickel addition will provide for a more corrosion resistance than a ferritic alloy. Conversely, when RA 253 MA replaces a ferritic steel without making dimensional changes, the additional creep strength should result in a part with a longer life, which could reduce warranty costs. Finally, the higher oxidation limits can be utilized by design engineers to make a more efficient system, which can operate at higher temperatures.
253MA is a trademark material of Outokumpu.
Marc Glasser is Director of Metallurgical Services at Rolled Alloys and is Heat Treat Today‘s resident expert in process metallurgy, heat treatment, materials of construction, and materials science and testing.
