HEAT TREAT RADIO

Heat Treat Radio #133: Process Qualification & Recipe Development in Vacuum Carburizing

/ HARDENING TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT TECH, VACUUM FURNACES TECHNICAL CONTENT

Heat Treat Radio host Heather Falcone and guest Vincent Lelong, Senior Synergy Center Manager and Metallurgist at ECM USA, explore the realities of process qualification and recipe development in modern heat treating. Vincent shares decades of experience developing vacuum carburizing processes for automotive, aerospace, and high-volume manufacturing applications. Together, they discuss how heat treaters can balance metallurgy, fixturing, quench strategy, and production demands to achieve repeatable results. From practical troubleshooting insights to the evolution of vacuum carburizing technology, this conversation offers a grounded look at what it takes to optimize heat treating.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:05)

Heather Falcone: Hi, I’m Heather Falcone, and welcome to Heat Treat Radio. Today, we are asking a metallurgist, and we are talking about the ins and outs of process qualification and recipe development. We are on-site with the sponsor of our episode, ECM USA, in beautiful Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. It’s a real treat to be able to record on site. We hardly ever get that chance. Joining me today is Vincent Lelong, the Senior Synergy Center Manager and Metallurgist. Thanks for joining me today, Vincent.

Vincent Lelong: Thank you, Heather.

Heather Falcone: So you have the luxury, since we are in your beautiful facility, to tell me not just about yourself, but also about ECM. Start off with your background because it is extensive.

Vincent Lelong: I am a metallurgist, I went to college in France, and I started with ECM in 1999. Since then, I’ve been across the world in the U.S. for 20 years. I do presentation and testing for the furnace behind us and our larger furnace. I go on-site. This is our Synergy Center; it’s a nice environment, clean — quiet today because we’re filming.

Heather Falcone: Tell me a little bit about what ECM does.

Vincent Lelong: At ECM, we manufacture and install heat treatment vacuum furnaces. Our main focus is on low-pressure carburizing modular furnaces, large and small. We integrate not just heat treatment itself, but the pre-treatment, like washing, storage, preparation of the load with robots, heat treatment, temper, cryo… Everything is set up together, and that is our main goal: integration of a fully automatic installation.

Heather Falcone: A one-stop shop. You go to one place, and you’re going to make it all work.

Vincent Lelong: There’s a part and everything will be ready in few hours later, sometimes days, depending on the treatment.

Heather Falcone: Hopefully it all works.

ECM Nano vacuum furnace used for client cycle development and qualification.

Vincent Lelong: Well, it always works. It’s a really repeatable modular furnace. In the U.S., we are focusing on vacuum carburizing, but we also manufacture other types of furnaces for crystal growth, silicon heat treatment, melting silicon for solar panel, and others. Within ECM Group, there’s a range of heat treatment processes that we manufacture for. And not just steel; it can be other materials. I’m specialized in steel and very restricted heat treatment with vacuum carburizing, but maybe one day we can do other materials.

Heather Falcone: Steel makes the world run.

Vincent Lelong: With our modular furnace, we can do hardening, gas quench, oil quench, carburizing, gas quench, oil quench, and now we do vacuum carbonitriding and we can do nitriding in the furnace. So you can have one installation for multitask heat treatment. It’s the purpose of the modular furnace, the beauty of it.

Heather Falcone: More flexibility, more capabilities.

Biggest Challenges of Process Qualification and Recipe Development (4:08)

Heather Falcone: That brings us into the first core question that I want to ask, because when you’re evaluating bringing in another piece of equipment or if you’re trying to bring on a new process, it can be a little challenging. What do you see are the biggest pitfalls or what do you see people struggling with most when it comes to process qualification and recipe development?

Vincent Lelong: Most customers say, “I would like a good metallurgy. I would like mechanical properties.”

Heather Falcone: Right, make good parts. That’s number one.

Vincent Lelong: But you need to look at what kind of furnace you would like to use, as well as the size, the type of part, and the process. If you have a small part, do you want a bulk load? Do you want special fixtures because the main target is distortion-free? Everybody would like everything…

Heather Falcone: …distortion-free!

Vincent Lelong: Always. No problem. So, as a metallurgist, you need to think not just about heat treatment because you’ve been asked to heat treat a part. I could heat and quench in oil and say, “You have the metallurgy. My job is done.”

Heather Falcone: Right. It hit hardness.

Vincent Lelong: Exactly. Hardness, good. Vacuum carburizing, no oxidation. Good. How about the distortion? Okay, let’s speak about what we can do to reduce the power of the heat treatment itself. Then, let’s do a gas quench, but let’s work on fixtures also. It’s working with the supplier for fixtures and working with the customer with the machinists.

Sometimes, because we propose gas quench, people say, “Oh, gas quench means no distortion.” Well, the first step is to get the metallurgy right. If you need 20 bar gas quench, you might have some distortion. From experience, we know that the fixtures are also important. So we can work with the customer and supplier to propose the right fixtures and test the fixtures to target the best cooling rate and other properties.

But we also need to work with the machinists. If you have a challenging part, machinists may say, “It’s the fault of the metallurgist.” And the heat treater will say, “No, let’s work together at the table. We’ll sit, and we do the testing.” At the Synergy Center we have also the CMM, so we can measure before heat treatment and after heat treatment. It’s the best feeling when you bring not just the metallurgists together, but also the people who make the part. We work together to have the best of the best. It’s a lot of work, but we have years of experience, so we can reach the target faster than 20 years ago.

Technology has changed. As such, you also need to work with the steel manufacturer, the way the steel is made and the composition. Research has shown that if you improve the steel, you can reduce the quench pressure. If you need oil quench, then you already know that distortion will be potentially higher. If you need 20 bar, it’s one thing. Well, I did a presentation not long ago, and I found that the distortion with 10 bar or 20 bar in a Nano furnace was much better than in a larger load. For one part, that is. This might not be true if it’s other parts. There’s always that phrase in heat treatment, “that depends.” I don’t like this phrase.

Heather Falcone: It always depends.

Vincent Lelong: But it’s true, unfortunately. So, when you have worked all that together, you can bring the best analysis. I’m working before that to sell a furnace.

I need to choose whether it’s better for the customer to have a smaller furnace or a larger installation. That really depends on how many parts, the diversity of parts. If the customer has mostly small parts, the Nano may be the better choice. You have a faster answer because it’s in and out. You don’t need to buy so many fixtures. But if you have a larger part, a larger furnace is better. It’s not whether one furnace is better than the other. You need to choose which one will achieve your production target.

A customer in facility number A may need a larger furnace, but in facility B, there are other types of part, so that facility may need a smaller furnace. That’s how we work with the customer to target what is important.

Heather Falcone: Pick the right atmosphere, pick the right hot zone size, pick the right fixturing, raw material specs. All of those are going to influence how the runs going to go. I bet you have some stories about TCE from fixturing and eutectic and inadvertent bonding.

Vincent Lelong: I certainly have had a few mistakes in testing. I used a higher temperature because with vacuum carburizing we say we can go to a higher temperature. But then I used CFC fixtures at the wrong temperature!

Today however, the mixtures of fixtures can work and reduce the weight. As a metallurgist and a heat treater, I prefer to heat treat the part rather than the fixtures. When I see a customer running a load with almost more fixtures than parts, I’m asking, “What do you heat treat?” Are you losing money on heat treating fixtures more than parts?”

Heather Falcone: There is such a big weight differential between fixturing and the parts. How much lag time on your heat up and cool down are you wasting on having too much fixturing?

Vincent Lelong: It’s true.

Balancing Technical Requirements with Production (11:30)

Heather Falcone: Once you’re in recipe development, how do you balance technical requirements, the repeatability, and the realities of production?

Vincent Lelong: Repeatability is firstly about how you design the load. Then you need to know the quantity of parts. You also may know the surface of your load, but it may always be necessary, I will say. Most of the time we don’t know that and it still runs correctly.

Heather Falcone: Still a black box. It’s an art what we do.

Vincent Lelong: Technically, it’s a good thing because when we put something inside the furnace, it’s coming back, and we don’t see much difference. But the mechanical properties are completely different, so it is kind of like magic.

So you define your load, you define your heating time to get temperature, and when you’re sure you’re at temperature, you start to carburize. I will speak about vacuum carburizing. First, we have software for the carburizing boost and diffusion; you input your parameters and then you have your recipe. You can run it generic, or you can go into detail and improve it. But as built, the software will give you some set parameters and will work.

Heather Falcone: Technology is so cool.

Vincent Lelong: It’s getting better and better. You will also need to select the type of furnace. When you have one part, it’s not the same as when you have 3,000 parts. The density of the load will influence your gas flow and the capacity of your installation.

Most of our larger furnaces have a maximum of acetylene of 4,000 liters. But you can play with the gas and the duration of the boost and diffusion so it goes inside the part; when you have a blind hole or you need 3 millimeters, you carburize. (Acetylene is beautiful, but molecules can go everywhere, sometimes where we don’t want acetylene, which is why we have the stop off.) But you define your load, you define your recipe, your gas flow, and then you run a test and analyze the metallurgy. If it’s good, then you’re done and you don’t move from that.

Heather Falcone: That’s what production wants to hear.

Vincent Lelong: When you are a heat treater, you may receive 10 parts to heat treat. Tomorrow you may receive 20 parts, and maybe you need to run the same recipe. In general, you can run the same recipe for 10 parts or 20 parts. You would use the parameters of the larger load for the smaller, if possible. The result will be mostly the same, but the cost will not be the same.

This is where you can optimize your recipe for different types of load, like half of the load versus a full load. You can change the flow of gas, and then reduce your heating time because why set for two hours when in one hour, it is at temperature. One hour is money.

Heather Falcone: Got to turn and burn.

Vincent Lelong: This is also where you define your database and your repeatability. I once had a customer that had me create a recipe for a specific quantity of parts and a design of load. A few years later, that customer called and said, “It doesn’t work.” With modern heat treating controls, we record everything, so you have a database, the curves, and you can go back and see what was wrong.

Heather Falcone: Right. What changed?

Vincent Lelong: In this case, I discovered the customer was running the double quantity of parts in the same load without changing the recipe at all.

Heather Falcone: Makes sense. Start there.

Vincent Lelong: Heating time was not long enough. Gas flow was not long enough. And they were not working at the right pressure in the furnace, so failure occurred. I said, “Change that.” No news is good news usually. If the customer doesn’t call you, it’s because…

Heather Falcone: …Everything works.

Vincent Lelong: That’s the beauty of this furnace.

With repeatability, you always need to look at the curves. If you have an issue of temperature out of the range, there will be an alarm. So, you can check if the part is good without checking the metallurgy. If you heat treat a big part, usually you won’t cut the part. If you have six parts in a load or 10, you have samples. You have to validate your sample and your real part at the beginning.

Heather Falcone: To make sure it’s representative.

Vincent Lelong: Exactly, or if there are differences because you cannot find exactly the same material, you know the difference, and the difference would be always the same.

Heather Falcone: Right. Make it predictable.

Vincent Lelong: We have some customers that would check one load per day or per shift and not every load. If you have 3,000 parts in a load, you can check a part. When you have six parts, you will likely not cut a part. If the furnace tells you it’s good, why check? When you check repeatability, you still need a lab. Not checking the metallurgy is difficult. You should always check again. Repeatability shouldn’t be left to chance or statistics. Take a part and check. Is it good? Then continue.

Heather Falcone: That’s kind of the target of qualification, right? To get those parameters that you predefined.

Vincent Lelong: In time you need to be sure nothing changes.

Heather Falcone: What does re-qualifying look like?

Vincent Lelong: You want to be sure that nothing changes, material-wise. Sometimes, you run the same material, and you achieve 35 HRC. But at one point in time, you achieved only 25 HRC. This is the same material on the paper, but something has happened. So you need to go back in time and figure out what was originally going on. Is it the heat treatment? Is the installation of something around it?

Heather Falcone: Use all the data that’s available to you.

Vincent Lelong: This is where you check the productivity.

Quench Media (19:20)

Heather Falcone: How about the quench media?

Vincent Lelong: When you develop a recipe, if you do oil quenching you will always do austenitizing. You don’t want a crack. You will carburize, austenitize, and go to oil quench. It’s pretty easy to switch from atmosphere oil quench to vacuum oil quench because technically the recipe is pretty much the same, and we’re going to cover that ground extensively because I know it’s kind of scary to even consider that possibility.

When you go with gas quench, if you don’t know the target or are unsure, you select 20 bar.

Heather Falcone: Sure, 20 bar. That’s the easiest in the world.

Vincent Lelong: Exactly. You do 20 bar and you get what you get. There is an advantage of the gas quench. Many customers will ask, “Do I need to do a direct quench? Do I need to do austenitizing?” Most of the time we say direct quench, and we found that you don’t crack with gas quench. Whatever the pressure, we never really have much cracking. Or a customer may ask, “Will the part break due to the gas quench?” That will never happen. I once asked the competition if they ever saw a crack with gas quenching and they said no. It’s the way the gas quench quenches and cools the part down, then it’s less powerful than the liquid, so you don’t have this potential issue.

But if you don’t know, you stay at 20 bar. If you would like to optimize, you can reduce, but you need to achieve the target metallurgy.

Heather Falcone: Right. You’ve got to get your core hardness.

Vincent Lelong: Your limit is when your metallurgy is not right. When you reduce, you reduce the cost. If you reduce the pressure and the speed, you will reduce the distortion potential.

Heather Falcone: Which is always a good thing.

Vincent Lelong: If you have a shaft, you should not place it horizontal, because whenever you quench that, it will not be straight.

Heather Falcone: We’ve potato chipped a few parts over the years, yes.

Vincent Lelong: Me too. I have tried horizontal in some cases. It’s interesting, but you need more support. I think it’s possible, but nobody wants to try it.

Heather Falcone: Why bother?

Vincent Lelong: Vertical is easier.

Heather Falcone: If you’re qualifying, just make the fixture that’s going to support it.

Vincent Lelong: Yes. Why should I change? It’s always a big question; we just quench it vertically this way. We do it this way. Now for gears, in heat treat sites I see a lot of vertical positions for gears strung on a rod. As an operator, I don’t like that.

Heather Falcone: Tell me why.

Vincent Lelong: Because it’s heavy. We already have difficulty finding operators in heat treatment. If it’s heavy, nobody wants to do it.

From a robotic point of view, it’s more difficult, too. Today, with most vacuum carburized and gas quenched gears are heat treated horizontally on fixtures and most of the time with offset position. That will give you the best metallurgy, but also the least distortion overall. Vertically for machinists, it’s very difficult to re-machine something round to oval. When you place it horizontally, you can do potato chips but machinists can grind and reshape the part easily, if it’s possible.

Heather Falcone: If you’re already near net, it’s going to be a different story.

Vincent Lelong: Exactly. That’s where when you check your distortion and repeatability of process — it’s the fixtures.

Heather Falcone: I would think working with the customer as much as you can to see if material can be left on the part too, if we do need to have grinding, if we do need to have repair or recovery for any possible distortion.

Vincent Lelong: So, let’s say we are working on a six-speed. For the six-speed, everybody wants to vacuum carburizing gas quench. The objective: zero distortion, heat treat, and assemble.

Heather Falcone: In theory.

Vincent Lelong: No, in truth.

Heather Falcone: Really? Okay.

Vincent Lelong: That was the target.

Heather Falcone: Ambitious, I like it.

Vincent Lelong: Yes, but when you have a new product, you can use new technology, you can work on the fixtures, you can work on everything. We worked a lot with car manufacturers to do the best heat treatment, the best fixtures, the maximum of parts, of course, and repeatability. This furnace is running millions of parts.

That is why we know vacuum carburizing works and it’s repeatable. For this high volume, we had to work on zero distortion. But the specification then didn’t change, metallurgically speaking. Most of the time it was 0.3 to 0.7 millimeters. It’s a large gap. No problem. Then we went to the 10-speed for most of the automotive, and then the distortion was the target because of the experience we gained with the six-speed, which was the noise. People don’t want the noise. Today, with the 10-speed, we start to grind at 0.1 millimeter.

You have to compensate for your carburizing process so that it is longer and deeper, but also most customers will reduce the metallurgical requirements. From 0.3 to 0.7, they want 0.5 plus or minus 0.05, which is much thinner. With electrical applications today, you want zero noise, because you can hear everything. There’s a lot of grinding, and when I say a lot, I mean exact, 0.2 millimeter.

Heather Falcone: That is a lot of post-process work.

Vincent Lelong: You have the perfect teeth. You need to anticipate longer carburizing, and it’s great! Also, what I see with metallurgy, it’s not that you don’t have a general metallurgical specification, but each area of a part will have its own metallurgy. That means you have the pitch of the gear, the roots, a minimum, but sometimes you have a specification of the tip.

A customer may specify, “I don’t want more than 0.8.”

Heather Falcone: Just for that area.

Vincent Lelong: Yes. As the parts get more and more complex, they have more than just one application or function. You have the spline. You have double teeth. Each one will have its own requirement. With an atmospheric furnace, to get that, it doesn’t work very well. But with vacuum carburizing, you can achieve very precise requirements.

Switching from Atmospheric to Vacuum Carburizing (28:11)

Heather Falcone: To that point, is that one of the things that stops people from considering the change from atmospheric to vacuum carburizing, or is it part complexity?

Considering the switch? See how different carburizing technologies and furnace features stack up when you click on the image above.

Vincent Lelong: The larger companies do not seem to be afraid, because they know what they want and they already have experience. For the heat treaters, the smaller companies, it’s very difficult to switch with the requirements today. When you see the requirement on the drawing, it’s funny because before there was just heat treatment.

Heather Falcone: Yeah, it’s on this process sheet.

Vincent Lelong: One line. Surface furnace ECD, core

Heather Falcone: Right.

Vincent Lelong: Today there are different requirements, and there are several requirements: before heat treatment, after, and final. You know how much you need to take off, and not every area you take off. You said keep more material. The advantage of that is more material, less distortion. But you will have to carburize more.

Heather Falcone: Ultimately it may be more expensive for everybody.

Vincent Lelong: Exactly. The machining behind the grinding is also costly. When we develop a recipe, we have the customer machine to the final dimension, do the heat treatment, and then we will see where we are in terms of metallurgy and distortion. If we are not where we need to be, don’t take off too much. Then you adjust.

One other story is about a thread.

Heather Falcone: Oh, God, threads. The bane of every heat treater’s existence, threads.

Vincent Lelong: I get a lot of questions about threads. Do I need to make them before heat treatment? Do I need to put a mask on, paint, or make the fixture?

Heather Falcone: Texture or mechanical.

Vincent Lelong: Or to not do them and do them after?

Heather Falcone: That is also expensive.

Vincent Lelong: Yes, also expensive; but I think it could be a robotic application.

Heather Falcone: Oh true. Very good point

Vincent Lelong: It’s the way I would go.

Heather Falcone: How interesting..

Vincent Lelong: To not do the thread before.

Heather Falcone: Lower risk.

Vincent Lelong: First, when you carburize, you can create a brittleness of the thread. But also operator movement of the thread from crate to the fixtures can cause damage to the thread. What do you do? Can you save the thread after heat treatment? Not always. Then that is garbage. You had to manufacture the part, heat treat the part, just to put in the garbage, which is a cost.

Heather Falcone: Probably 80 or 90% of your whole cost, gone in an instant.

Vincent Lelong: In my opinion, you could have a robot preparing the load. You would have a robot take off, and every time it’s the same movement. Then, thread or not, it’s easier.

Heather Falcone: More predictable.

Vincent Lelong: Then the robot, if you don’t do the thread, can put the shaft, usually it’s a shaft with a right connection on the thread on the end, put to a little induction machine, reheat, and then put in a crate and go back to machining. Then it’s all done.

In that instance, I think it’s my preference not to do the thread first. I have customers who ask me for paint or for a mask. Paint is not, I would say, 100% safe. You need a specialist to put on the paint. There are some tricks, as I know heat treaters know. They have been doing this for years and they know their stuff.

Heather Falcone: That’s their secret.

Vincent Lelong: I think heat treaters have more secrets about painting and protection of the part than the big companies do. They know it better.

Heather Falcone: Their lives are on the line. That’s all they do, so they have to make it perfect.

Vincent Lelong: You can learn a lot from heat treaters. They know their work.

Heather Falcone: That’s what I always recommend to the captives. Get out to as many heat treat shops as you can, because it’s going to make your in-house heat treat better.

Vincent Lelong: They have years of experience to learn from. Heat treatment is tricks after tricks. Some customers are afraid to go to in-house heat treatment. These heat treaters hold a variety of information that is helpful for these customers.

Heather Falcone: It’s an interesting point that you brought up about being afraid, because vacuum carburizing has gotten that reputation over the years that it’s difficult. It’s tough to figure out.

Vincent Lelong: Because we did a good job. We did a good job to say you can optimize. In reality, if you understand what you want to heat treat, the carburizing process is all made by software. Every company has their own software. So it is pretty simple, and though it can still be scary for the heat treater.

Heather Falcone: Process change is scary.

Vincent Lelong: There are some companies that develop vacuum carburizing software where you need to know everything about the steel, the chemistry, all the parameters. We work with carbon. For our software, you enter the carbon content originally, roughly the temperature you would like to heat treat, and what you would like on the final. The software will give you something, and it will be 95% of what you’re looking for.

Now you need to quench. Like I said, with oil quenching, it’s no problem. Gas quenching, 20 bar, no problem, very easy and straightforward. Optimization can be where it’s trickier. But it’s just like an atmospheric furnace. I work with atmospheric furnaces, and they all have their cheat sheets.

You need carbon potential, temperature, time, and in vacuum carburizing, it’s the same thing. The temperature, your carbon potential, or what you expect for carbon, the time, the case depth you would like to achieve, and here is your process.

Heather Falcone: Then you don’t need the cheat sheet. It’s gone. Then it’s documented and repeatable.

Vincent Lelong: Right, then you have to heat up and quench. So, straight heat treatment: heat it up to be sure you’re at temperature, then carburize, and you quench.

Heather Falcone: One test?

Vincent Lelong: Yes, I often do just one test.

Customers may ask me to do a test for a Flex system, a larger system. I do it here at the Synergy Center first because it’s cheaper for me because it just value add and it’s here. I can mix a different part, different design, and run. “Oh, it’s a 8620? No problem.” Usually, it’s good.

For a Nano load, it’s like a one-fifth or it’s a one fixture and the bigger load, it’s like two column of fixtures, then you stack. So, it’s not much different. You start on a smaller scale and you go bigger, and you just add a little heat up time.

And if you ask me, “What do you need?” Put everything to the maximum!! (We are here to sell you a spare part, so, you know.) But really, if you put everything to the maximum you will be good. Maybe too good, and you might have a more maintenance, but we’d be able to provide a quote to reduce the maintenance. (*joking laughter*) 

Closing Thoughts (37:36)

Heather Falcone: As we finish up, if there’s one thing that you’d want our listeners to take away, rethinking about their approach to process qualification and recipe development, what do you want them to know?

Vincent Lelong: It’s not difficult. It’s like every other heat treatment; you have to test it and you will quickly see that it’s easy. At ECM USA, we provide training and testing to show you what can be achieved and answer your questions. If you’re worried, we will show you how easy it is, how clean it is. There’s no flame. If you have oil quench, there’s no flame because everything is protected. So it’s not difficult, it’s just one step. Do not be afraid.

Heather Falcone: Take that first step, and explore the process.

Vincent Lelong: I think there’s enough research and evidence in the last 25 years in the U.S., especially with large automotive and aerospace companies to know that it’s not a big deal. Most people — in heat treating or not — don’t like change.

Heather Falcone: But they can partner with you, Vincent, who has decades of experience. Reach out to ECM. Get in touch. Start exploring.

Vincent Lelong: The funny thing is, with decades of experience, what we are capable of heat treating 20 years ago we can do way better now. The technology is better. Gas quenching is made to quench, not to cool. It’s quenching. It’s hard. It’s almost as hard of a quench as an oil quench. You can do bulk load carburizing. I did carbonitriding in bulk load not that long ago. If you had asked me to do that 20 years ago, I would say, “No way that works.” But today that works. Just contact us.

Heather Falcone: Start the conversation, right?

Vincent Lelong: And I would be happy to show you. I like my job.

Heather Falcone: You love your job. I’m going to say it. You’re very passionate.

Vincent Lelong: I like testing because it’s a challenge every day. It’s pushing the limit. It’s like a movie. Is it possible? If you follow the book or internet, they will say no. I would say, “Let’s try.” I’m testing on materials other than steel as well that I would not have expected to work. Modular furnaces can be a very versatile.

Heather Falcone: Well it sounds like production is getting ready to get things done. Thanks so much, Vincent. It was great spending time with you.

About the Guest

Vincent Lelong
Synergy Center Manager / Sr. Metallurgist
ECM USA, INC.

Vincent Lelong, ECM USA Synergy Center Manager, transferred to ECM USA in 2005 to manage the North American Testing Program in Wisconsin after 6 years’ experience with production/testing furnaces at ECM Technologies headquarters in Grenoble, France. Vincent has degrees in Chemistry & Physics from the University of Reims, and Treatment of Materials (specializing in Heat Treatment) from BTS Roosevelt, also located in Reims, France. He began his career as a production and laboratory technician for a commercial heat treater, and joined the ECM Group in 1999 as an ECM Technician running LPC testing/metallurgical analysis within ECM vacuum furnace systems.

For more information: Contact Vincent Lelong at vincentlelong@ecm-usa.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #132: Must-Attend Heat Treat Events of 2026 and Beyond

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO

In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, host Heather Falcone sits down with Doug Glenn, publisher of Heat Treat Today, to break down the most important heat treat industry events on the horizon. From the massive international state of the THERMPROCESS trade show to the technical knowledge of Furnaces North America, they explore where those in the industry can learn, network, and grow. The conversation also highlights Heat Treat Today’s own events, including Heat Treat Boot Camp and Helium Leak Detection seminars. Together, they offer practical guidance on choosing the right events to stay engaged and informed in today’s heat treating landscape.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:05)

Heather Falcone: Hi, I am Heather Falcone and welcome to Heat Treat Radio. Today we are talking about a variety of upcoming events in the industry in 2026 and beyond. Joining me today is Doug Glenn, publisher of Heat Treat Today, and longtime host of Heat Treat Radio. Doug has had a front row seat to this industry for years, from the technical side to the people driving it forward. He’s also someone that I consider a mentor and a friend. I’m looking forward to digging into this conversation with him.

It’s an honor to sit down together with this one, Doug, as it’s kind of a bit of a hand off and a nod to the legacy that you’ve built here.

Doug Glenn: It’s a pleasure, and I couldn’t think of a better person to hand it off to. Heather, you’re doing great, and I appreciate you taking the time to do it and having the courage to do it.

Heather Falcone: Obviously, you have recorded over a hundred episodes, so I have so much to learn for you. Thank you so much for trusting me with this.

Key Events for 2026 and Beyond (1:19)

Heather Falcone: Doug, walk us through 2026 and beyond. We have so much going on for events. What are the key events that people should have on their radar?

Doug Glenn: We often say at Heat Treat Today that we believe people are happier, and they make better decisions when they are well informed. Our whole goal is to make people happy by giving them good information so they can make better decisions, and that that always works well. We do that in a variety of ways. Primarily it’s through our print publication — the technical articles that go out in that print publication. Our most popular product is our print publication. Most of that deals with heat treating, thermal processing, technologies, materials, etc.

But there’s also the element of continuing to sharpen your saw, as Stephen Covey says; keep yourself fresh. To that extent, attending industry shows, events, and educational seminars is helpful.

There’s a there’s a big show coming up in Germany in 2027. It’s called THERMPROCESS, but it’s actually one of four events that are all metals related, so we will talk about that whole quartet of shows. I will also talk about Furnaces North America because it is the leading thermal process/heat treat event of 2026. Then also we also have two Heat Treat Today events that I think might be helpful. Our Heat Treat Boot Camp, and then also our Helium Leak Detection seminars.

Those are the events I’m going to talk about today, but there are more events than that. If you are interested in learning more about important industry events, visit our website, heattreattoday.com, and look under Resource tab. There is the Industry Events calendar. That would be a real good place to start because we try to put all of the events that we think are important to most heat treaters and suppliers of the industry.

It’s important to note, when we talk about heat treat, we have to be very careful. We are not only talking about commercial heat treaters. That’s only about 10 to 15% of the audience that we reach. We are talking about captive heat treaters. That’s who Heat Treat Today is meant to be helpful to.

Heather Falcone: Reaching the broader industry at large is always our goal. Making sure that everyone has access to this. When you have an in-house heat treat operation, sometimes you can be even more isolated. So getting those companies exposed to as much information and data as possible.

THERMPROCESS 2027 (4:26)

Heather Falcone: Speaking of that, if someone can only commit to one or two events this year, I think we should really start with THERMPROCESS, because that one kind of rises to the top. We can unpack that a little bit first.

Doug Glenn: I think that’s a really good idea. The show itself, THERMPROCESS 2027 (thermprocess-online.com), is only one of four [in a trade fair quartet]. That show does not take place until June 21–25 of 2027. It’s over a year away. But the reason we need to talk about it now is because, unlike shows here in the United States, this is a huge show, and if you want to exhibit there, which many of our listeners may be suppliers in the industry, applications need to be in by the end of May of this year, not next year. So I wanted to make sure people are aware of that.

To give you a sense of what’s going on in that event, I want to provide a site map of the campus where THERMPROCESS is taking place. First thing to know is that there are four shows altogether. It’s held only every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany. Looking at the map, they call it “The Bright World of Metals,” you’ll notice the four logos across the top, which are GIFA, METEC, THERMPROCESS, and NEWCAST.

This is a huge campus. If you were to walk from the upper left corner, the Merkur Spiel Arena, all the way down to the east entrance, that would take you probably 10 to 15 minutes.

GIFA is a foundry show, and is located in halls 11 through 17. The dark blue on the map is all GIFA.

METEC is the gray on the map, halls 1, 4, and 5. This show is basically steel making, metallurgy, etc.

THERMPROCESS is in one hall, hall 10, and it’s the largest hall. It’s larger than any heat treat show here in the United States by far.

NEWCAST is basically a metallurgy show, steel processing, some forging as well. That’s in halls 14 and 15.

This show is open five days, from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m., all five days. If you were to spend your time walking through this show, it would basically take you all five days to go through this. It’s a huge event.

Let me give you a sense of this size. The total attendance for this entire event for 2023, which was the last one that they had, was 63,000 attendees. Even if you divide that by four, because there’s four different shows, that’s almost 16,000 people per show. To give you a sense of size difference in the United States: our biggest heat treat show, typically Furnaces North America or the ASM Heat Treat Show, attendance is no more than 2,500 people, including exhibitors and everything. You can get a sense that this is the right show.

It’s held in Dusseldorf, Germany. Germany of all countries in the world knows how to do trade shows. There are booths in these halls that are double decker booths, large booth displays. There are even restaurants on the upper level — it is a full event. Companies will spend millions of dollars just on this show.

My suggestion is, if you’ve never been to this show, or if you have a need for a full understanding in the thermal processing/heat treating industry, this is the premier event in the world, as far as I’m concerned. China has some big shows as well. I believe this one is more international. You will see people from all over Europe and the United States as well. 63,000 people total.

For just THERMPROCESS, there are 276 exhibitors, and the show takes up 8,400 square meters, which is about 90,000 square feet. Over on the Foundry side, obviously the biggest show here, taking up almost six halls, there are 854 exhibitors in about 41,315 square meters or 445,000 square feet of booth space. These are big shows.

Heather Falcone: It’s massive.

Doug Glenn: It is massive. There are companies exhibiting there from all over. Not only Western Europe, but Eastern Europe too, Turkey, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, China, India, etc. The United States, to be quite honest, is not always that well represented.

I think this is probably one of the more important things that I wanted to mention about this event. Heat Treat Today is promoting and sponsoring a pavilion there at THERMPROCESS. If you would like to be part of that pavilion, you can call me and we’ll see what we can do.

It’s a big deal, it’s a big show. May 31 of this year is the exhibitor deadline. For those of you who are interested in attending, which I highly recommend, thermprocess-online.com is the website.

If you’ve never been to Dusseldorf, it’s definitely worth going just to see Dusseldorf. There’s this place in Dusseldorf, a section of the town called the Altstadt, which is the old city. It’s a great place, hundreds of restaurants and great to experience the culture. It’s worth it after the show ends.

Also, the public transportation in Germany is very good. There are trams that run, which make it pretty convenient to get to the exhibit hall.

Heather Falcone: What kind of company roles do you think would be best suited to attend THERMPROCESS? Who do you think would most benefit from this event?

Doug Glenn: You would want more of your upper management personnel attending this event, not so much your furnace operators. You could do that — it would not be a problem taking the furnace operators over there. But it’s typically more engineers and up. One big difference between this show and most shows in Germany compared to shows in the United States: there is not a conference associated with it. They do offer some technical presentations, typically five or six a day in the small auditorium on the show floor. So you might get 30 different technical presentations, but this is primarily a trade show. It is a show where people sit down in their meeting rooms in their booths where they can close the door and have a private meeting, and they buy and sell there.

This is a show where if you want to do business, this is the premier event. In my 30 plus year experience, this has been the most impressive show, for thermal processing/heat treating, so I highly recommend attending.

Furnaces North America (14:28)

Heather Falcone: That’s a great point that you brought up, the difference between a trade show and the technical presentations. Compared to Furnaces North America (FNA), it’s a whole different ball game.

Doug Glenn: FNA is October 12–14, 2026 in Indianapolis. The website for that event is furnacesnorthamerica.com.

The difference is marked between THERMPROCESS and FNA. It’s just a whole different category in a variety of ways. The number of exhibitors is going to be somewhere in the range of 150 to 200, maybe right on the upper end. The trade show hours are typically a little bit shorter, maybe 11 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. It’s only a two-day show, not a five-day show. And there are a lot of technical sessions that are held. There’s a much better opportunity for more formal learning, if you will, where you can go to some classroom environments.

Furnaces North America is owned and operated by the Metal Treating Institute (MTI), which Heather and I are both members of, which is great. MTI is the world’s largest association of commercial heat treaters. While MTI is commercial heat treaters, Furnaces North America is really intended for captive heat treaters, as well as commercial heat treaters, to help advance the technology, knowledge of processes, and materials in the North American market.

It is a good event. It starts on a Monday night, the 12th of October, with a nice opening reception. Then Tuesday is a full day of conferences and the trade show. Wednesday, the conferences begin again in the morning, and then the trade show is open until around 2 p.m. So it’s a rather abbreviated show compared to THERMPROCESS.

Heather Falcone: It’s one of the more unique events because often, when you’re at a trade show, you do want to try and get some learning in, but you also want to get out and see the vendors on the floor. So they’ve set it up really well so that you never have to miss a concurrent session. In fact, they don’t even have the trade show floor open during the conferences. So, it ensures the exhibitors do not have to leave the trade show to attend session, and it lets people attend sessions without feeling guilty that they’re not out there hitting the booths at the trade show.

Doug Glenn: Exactly, they can actually go and do some of the learning as well. If I remember correctly, Heather, you’ve been involved with program development of FNA in the past.

Heather Falcone: Yes, I tend to do a session or so. Last time I think I talked about industry involvement, which is similar to the topic today. Getting involved in the industry is one of the best things you could do for yourself and your company.

Doug Glenn: That’s FNA in a nutshell. There are still some booths available. Although I don’t anticipate that will last long. Call or go to furnacesnorthamerica.com to check in on that, or contact me or Heather, and we can steer you in the right direction.

Heather Falcone: I honestly believe anyone would benefit from going to FNA because of the technical sessions. There’s a lot of learning to be had, even down to someone that’s more operational. It’s not just meant for that owner level. It’s pretty approachable.

Doug Glenn: I would agree. The expense of going to FNA is also substantially less than the expense of going to THERMPROCESS over in Germany. So you do see a good number of shop floor personnel at this, but it is also a good place to send your upper management personnel, depending on the size of your company, and your decision makers, as far as capital expenditures go. It is a good place to bring those people. You can gather a lot of information in a very short time walking around this show.

Heather Falcone: You can cover a lot of ground and really get some good relationship and networking going. It’s a great setup.

Heat Treat Today Events (19:20)

Heather Falcone: Let’s discuss the Heat Treat Today events, I think that there’s some truly unique offerings.

Doug Glenn: While Furnaces North America is not a Heat Treat Today-owned and operated event, we are the exclusive media sponsor of the event. But Heat Treat Today also has its own events.

Firstly, we have our most fun event, which is called Heat Treat Boot Camp. It was a brainchild of mine quite a few years ago because I tend to have a mile wide and an inch deep knowledge of the industry. I am no expert in any one area, but I have this experience of being here and absorbing over 30 years worth of information and relationships. So I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to share some of that information with people who are just wanting to get their heads wrapped around the North American heat treat market? What is it, who’s there, what are we doing, what are the materials — all that good stuff.

So we put together this event called Heat Treat Boot Camp. It is not heavily technical — you don’t need to know metallurgy or anything of that sort to attend. And it’s not just focused on any one piece of equipment, any one company’s equipment, or any one process, like brazing. It is cross-cutting. If you’re coming into the industry, or if you’ve been in the industry for a long time but have only focused on point X because that’s what you’re paid for, you can attend Heat Treat Boot Camp to get a broader view of this whole market. The added benefit of that is that you might find out there are other areas that your company could add that could potentially be profitable.

This is our fifth year coming up. It’s going to be held in Cleveland, Ohio, from Monday, September 14 to Wednesday, September 16, 2026. Our first four events were held in Pittsburgh, which is a great city. But we’re going to Cleveland this year, which should be very good.

Here are the five things that we cover: heat treat markets, materials, processes, products, and players. By players, we mean, Who are the companies that manufacture the equipment… Equipment, components, supplies, materials? That’s the players.

We start the event on Monday night with a very nice opening reception. It’s usually just a nice time to get together and meet each other. Tuesday is the bootcamp day. It’s grueling, it’s a solid day of intensive learning, talking, slideshows, passing on knowledge. Thomas Wingens from WINGENS Industrial Consultancy is my partner and we teach the lectures. Thomas focuses more on the technical side because he’s a metallurgist. So he tries to explain processes and materials in terms that people who are not metallurgists can understand.

Wednesday morning is another half day of classes, and then it’s officially over at the end of the half day. However, we offer an optional heat treat plant tour afterwards on Wednesday afternoon. It is very cool actually because people who have never been to a heat treat shop can experience one.

When we were in Pittsburgh, we went to two. We alternated between Penna Flame Industries in Zelienople, PA, and Solar Atmospheres of Western Pennsylvania in Hermitage. Both are an hour from downtown Pittsburgh. Now that we’re going to Cleveland, we will be visiting Euclid Heat Treating, which is going to be a blast.

That’s bootcamp. It’s really worthwhile. You can visit heattreatbootcamp.com to learn more or you can go to our website, heattreattoday.com and look under events and hit Heat Treat Boot Camp. Feel free to register. If your company is bringing three or more people, get ahold of me and I’ll give you a discount code so you can get a little bit of a deal on registration. It’s a great event. It’s not overly technical. We had a couple company owners who bought furnace manufacturers and so have come to listen and learn. It’s meant for personnel in sales, marketing, and engineering to a certain extent as well. It’s really targeted at suppliers, but we have had quite a few captive heat treaters and commercial heat treaters who have also attended.

Heather Falcone: It’s a very approachable event and anybody should try it. This is a good opportunity for folks that are not necessarily exposed to a lot of the operations. Your HR people even. What’s a great chance to understand what your floor people are going through so that your HR can serve them better? Or accounting or anybody who hasn’t been exposed to the ins and outs of the industry. It’ll give them such a nice strategic understanding across the board without getting too heavy. Really good bang for the buck for such a short amount of time.

Doug Glenn: “Two plus years of industry knowledge in two days.” It’s like drinking out of the proverbial fire hydrant. Very worthwhile.

Helium Leak Detection Seminars (26:00)

Heather Falcone: Let’s finish off by talking about Dave and the seminars.

Doug Glenn: Dave Deiwert is a helium vacuum leak detection expert who has been in the industry many, many years. These are single-day, in-person seminars where attendees will learn hands-on tips. Dave has leak detection equipment from several different suppliers. He will explain the theory behind helium leak detection, and provide solid, practical advice on how to do it. We had our first one this year in March in Charlotte, which was well attended.

The next helium leak detection seminar is in Philadelphia on June 10th, and then we’ll have one in Long Beach, California on August 12. Our final one is scheduled the day after the Furnaces North America event ends in Indianapolis. It’s going to be located right in that neighborhood. The idea was, go to Furnaces North America, stay an extra day, and attend the Helium Leak Detection seminar. It’s scheduled for the October 15 in Indianapolis.

If you’re interested in more information on those seminars, visit heattreattoday.com/leakdetectionseminar, all one word. ​

Closing Remarks(28:36)

Doug Glenn: It is a lot going on. It is a lot going on, and I want to give a shout out to our in-house events director who’s just taking on the role this year, Karen Gantzer. Karen’s been doing a great job squaring all this stuff away. We give her this wild thing and she’s taken it by the horns and is getting it done.

Heather Falcone: With a smile always!

We covered a lot of ground today. I’m really excited about what we’ve got to be able to offer to the industry. This has been unpacking these, helps them understand exactly what might speak to them individually.

It was a lot of fun spending a little time with you. You’re a mentor, you’re the legacy. You brought us over a hundred episodes of radio, I’m going to say it until I’m blue in the face!

Doug Glenn: Yeah, well it’s nice to not have to ask the questions. It’s nice to actually be able to answer them, so thank you. I appreciate you allowing me to come on.​

About the Guest

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn is the founder and publisher of Heat Treat Today, a thermal processing industry consultant, and a longtime industry voice and conference speaker with over 30 years of experience. He spent two decades as publisher of Industrial Heating magazine, where he helped expand its global reach, and has played a key role in launching major industry events, including Furnaces North America.

For more information: Contact Doug Glenn at doug@heattreattoday.com.

Heat Treat Radio #132: Must-Attend Heat Treat Events of 2026 and Beyond Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #131: Beyond Calibration — Real-World Accuracy in Heat Treat Measurement

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO, INSTRUMENTATION TECHNICAL CONTENT, THERMOCOUPLES TECHNICAL CONTENT

What does it really take to achieve accurate temperature measurement in the real heat treat production? In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, host Heather Falcone sits down with Dr. Steve Offley, product marketing manager at PhoenixTM, to explore the science behind thru-process monitoring, thermal barriers, and data logger performance. From cold junction compensation to real-world shop floor challenges, they unpack why lab accuracy doesn’t always translate to production — and what heat treaters can do about it. Tune in to learn how to ensure your temperature data is as reliable as the parts you produce.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:04)

Heather Falcone: Today we are talking about a feature article coming up in this month’s magazine, Achieving Accurate Measurements in Real Heat Treat Production. Joining me today is author of this piece, Dr. Steve Offley from PhoenixTM, who is also our sponsor for today’s episode.

Steve is a product marketing manager at PhoenixTM with responsibility for both strategic product management and global marketing of the company’s thru-process temperature, optical profiling, and TUS system product range. Steve joined PhoenixTM in April of 2018 after 22 years of experience in the industrial temperature profiling market with another well-known company.

The Role of PhoenixTM (2:35)

Heather Falcone: Tell us about your role at PhoenixTM and the role of PhoenixTM, specifically how they provide solutions for the thermal processors out there.

Steve Offley: I am the product marketing manager or product manager for the range of temperature monitoring systems that we offer to the wider industrial space. We provide support for clients in a range of industries who are faced with the daily challenges of using thermal processing as part of their key manufacturing step. We offer unique solutions for those specific applications, because not every application is the same. Our goal is to allow the customer to monitor the temperature of their specific product in some form of heat treatment process.

For instance, we could be offering a solution for the coating market, where a client wants to monitor the thermal cure of a car body. They want to ensure that that car body, as it travels through the curing oven, is achieving the correct temperature, not just in the oven itself, but at the product level. So is each part of that car body achieving the right temperature for the right duration to cure the paint?

Another day we might be dealing with a food processor who, as you can imagine, when they’re dealing with food safety and HACCP requirements, they want to prove that the core of their product, which may be a chicken fillet in a deep fat fryer, is achieving the right temperature, to make sure that it’s safe and it’s an attractive product to eat. And of course, they want to be confident that the consumer is going to be healthy after consuming the product too.

In the buildings and ceramics industry, for instance, we can offer the same sort of solution for the manufacturers of bricks, building materials, tiles, etc., where the process may actually be up to three or four days long where they’re drying the products. But it’s still critical to know what the temperature is at the product level.

Much of our focus is on heat treatment of metals. We are trying to provide different solutions across the whole gamut of the heat treating industry — from primary production, such as slab heat treatment for steel and for aluminum, proving that the raw material has been processed correctly in the furnace, to the finished product.

We are talking about the formed metal product, making sure that that is achieving the right primary metallurgical properties. It needs to do the function it’s going to be used for, from a temperature profiling perspective and also possibly even a temperature uniformity survey (TUS), which is obviously critical in many of the automotive and aerospace sectors of the market where they’re trying to prove or validate the furnace performance.

What is Thru-Process Monitoring? (6:08)

Heather Falcone: Can you explain what thru-process is and how it influences the monitoring technology that you’re talking about?

Click the image above for an introduction to the thru-process concept and data logger basics.

Steve Offley: “Thru-processes” is the term that is key to the type of solution we are trying to provide. When we’re talking about heat treatment, there are still many applications where the product may be heat treated in a static box furnace, in which case the traditional technology of using trained thermocouples is probably as easy as any other, whereby you have your field test instrument external to the furnace chamber. The thermocouples are then moved into — or traced into — the furnace, attached either to the product or, if you’re doing a thermal uniformity survey, to a test frame to locate the thermocouples at the desired coordinates within the working zone of the furnace. Then you are collecting the data externally.

I believe it was two episodes ago that you had Dennis from ECM talking about modular heat treatment. He was talking about the challenges of or the increased level of technology associated with moving batches of products around the heat treating cycle in a modular approach.

When you have that type of setup, and even in situations where you may be heat treating in a continuous furnace, the use of a trailing thermocouple becomes difficult at best, impractical and problematic in terms of safety at worst. For the modular approach, you have thermocouples going into different chambers and moving around. There are seals and automated doors in which the thermocouples will be trapped. As such, it’s very difficult to actually monitor the whole sequence of events that may be occurring in the heat treatment sequence.

Traditional vs. Thru-Process Monitoring

This brings us back to the thru-process methodology. At Phoenix, we offer a system that is designed to travel as if it was part of the product basket through the process. The field test instrument, the data logger, has to travel with the product through the furnace.

A data logger in its own right is not capable of going through a furnace if you are measuring at 800°F to 1000°F. One of the key aspects of our system solution is what we refer to as the thermal barrier. It is an enclosure that is used to protect the data logger to allow it to travel through the process. Essentially you encase the data logger inside the barrier and then place it on the conveyor or in the product basket with short thermocouples that are then rooted to the product or to the test frame that’s being moved with the whole monitoring system through the process.

The Importance of Thermal Barrier Design (9:38)

Heather Falcone: The thermal barrier design is really important then, because you’re going to see a variety of environments. How do you protect the data logger?

Steve Offley: That’s the crux of the technology that we’re trying to provide, in so much that there are many different forms of heat treatment or many different forms of thermal processing where we’re trying to provide the protection we need.

You may have, for instance, a low pressure carburizing process where you’re putting the system into a vacuum furnace, and then you may have a high pressure quench at the end. You have to protect the logger and not just from the temperature criteria inside the furnace, but certain things like pressure changes, which can distort the equipment. That is one design barrier, which would give additional protection to prevent any distortion or compressional damage to the barrier.

Click on the image above to find a real-world companion to Dr. Offley’s barrier design examples, covering oil and water quench protection in practice.

There may be some circumstances, like with a T6 aluminum process, where you have sent the system through the furnace, you then got a water quench, and now in the thru-process principle, the equipment has to go through all aspects of the process. You therefore have to have a design in which the system can tolerate both the heating process, but also the rapid cooling going into the water.

You may also have a situation where you have an Endothermic carburizing furnace with an integrated oil quench. The same approach applies. You are going from a hot environment and then rapid cooling. You are not only protecting the logger from the damage of the heat, but also the materials, like the oil or water in the water sequential and oil quench scenario, so as to not damage the fairly sophisticated electronics of the data log.

There is a lot of science and technology involved in designing unique solutions to meet the specific requirements of the applications. In most cases, we are working with the client from their working spec to develop unique solutions that will meet their unique requirements.

Protection and Accuracy (13:36)

Heather Falcone: When we’re talking about actually monitoring the surveys, what special measures are you required to design the data loggers with that provide accuracy?  

Steve Offley: By the very nature that we are sending the data logger through the furnace, we have to be careful that we are not only protecting the data logger from physical damage, which is possible if we do not get the thermal barrier design correct. But we also want, at the end of the day, to guarantee that we are achieving the accurate data that we need to make sense of the profile information that we are getting. Because at the end of the process, you either have the thermal fingerprint of your process or if you’re doing temperature uniformity survey, you have the readability of the data at the respective test levels. According to the standard CQI-9 and AMS2750, the accuracy of the reading or the field test instrument has to be within ±1°F.

The purpose of the barrier is to not only protect the data logger from damage, but keep the data logger at a working temperature that allows the accuracy of the reading that conforms to the standards that you are working to.

There are different designs of thermal barriers that we can offer. The basic design is what we refer to as the microporous insulation technology. This is basically a dry barrier whereby the insulation slows down the penetration of the heat to the core of the barrier where the data logger is. But at the center of that barrier, there will be a device that we refer to as a heat sink. There’s a eutectic salt inside the heat sink, which will transfer its physical state from a solid to a liquid at a nominal temperature. It’s 58°C where the transfer occurs and that will maintain the temperature at that working temperature.

For longer processes, you may want to use a thermal barrier that uses what we call a phased evaporation protection methodology. In simple terms, it involves the use of water, which is able to absorb very large amounts of energy and heat, and obviously will boil at 212°F (100°C). While it’s maintaining that boiling state, it will maintain the temperature of the thermal barrier and the data logger inside it. So we can actually offer a high temperature data logger that is capable of operating safely at 212°F for long periods time and still be protected.

Thermocouple Use (17:00)

Steve Offley: As long as the barrier provides us with that thermal protection and the logger is working within its operating range, we are fairly safe. That being said, we have to be a little bit careful when we consider the technology of the thermocouple, because there’s some fairly serious restrictions on thermocouple use, which many people may or may not be aware of.

Many people know that the thermocouple technology was developed by Dr. Seebeck back in about 1821. He was a German physicist who discovered the fact that if you had two dissimilar metals connected at a junction or a point, at a particular temperature, those two dissimilar metals would create a millivolt reading, and that millivolt reading would be proportional to the actual temperature that those two dissimilar metals were experiencing. Hence the theory of the thermocouple.

Dr. Steve Offley showing the aluminal and the chromal leg of a type K thermocouple.

Most people are fully aware of what a thermocouple looks like, but it’s important to note that this is a type of thermocouple we’d use for a coating application. It has a PFA-insulated sleeving on it. You would not use this in many heat treatment applications, but what I want to do is to show you that in the core of the thermocouple, there are two wires, two dissimilar metals. This is a type K thermocouple. We have the aluminal and the chromal leg of the thermocouples. These are the unique materials that are used to generate the millivolt reading.

The way the thermocouple works then is that that millivolt can be cross-referenced to a calibration table or a voltage table to determine the temperature reading that the sensor. This is what we refer to as the hot junction, the very tip of the thermocouple. It’s critical that that point is where you want the measurement to be made.

What is often missed is the fact that with a thermocouple, although the hot junction is critical, there is another junction that is even possibly more critical and sometimes overlooked — the cold junction. The thermocouple does not actually record an absolute reading, it’s a ratio between the hot junction and the cold junction. The cold junction of a thermocouple is where the actual thermocouple materials, the two dissimilar metals, join what we refer to as the copper connection. This tends to be where, in the data logger or the field test instrument, the electronics make the physical measurement or process the actual reading from the thermocouple.

If you have a fixed data logger like we have at Phoenix, whereby you would designate the type of thermocouple you were plugging into the data logger — this is a data logger with 20 channels and it’s a type K — I would plug my thermocouple simply into that connector. The cold junction is not in this case at the point where I’m making the connection on the data logger. It is actually inside the logger because there is another wire that goes from the socket to the PCB board where the measurement is actually taken.

Inside the data logger, there is a connector block where the thermocouple wires from the thermocouple sockets will all join the PCB board where the measurement is taken. That’s the location where the cold junction measurement is taken. So, we have our hot junction at the end of the thermocouple, and we have our cold junction inside the data logger.

A side-by-side comparison of the two critical measurement points in any thermocouple circuit: hot junction vs. cold junction.

For some data loggers, that connector or that coal junction may actually be on the outside of the data logger, if it’s a universal connector. So it’s important that you understand where that cold junction is in-situ within your technology. The importance of the reading is the fact that you have a ratio between the hot junction where you are measuring the product and the cold junction where that physical measurement is being referenced inside the data logger.

You can imagine, therefore, if the data logger temperature changes, that change in data logger temperature can actually affect the reading you are taking inside your process. That is why it is important to either understand that and make changes so it’s prevented or do what we refer to as cold junction compensation.

Cold Junction Compensation (22:35)

Steve Offley: Inside the data logger, if you are going to compensate for that temperature difference, the data logger is protected up to a physical temperature. But the temperature is going to change. So that cold junction is going to change as it travels through the processing in the way that we do our measurements for thru-process monitoring. The logger will rise in temperature. Therefore, we have to compensate for that.

In the center of the data logger where the connection is made with the copper from the thermocouple cable to the copper-copper connection, we have a temperature sensor, a thermistor, which is accurate to 0.18°F. It measures the actual cold junction temperature of the logger, and it will then compensate automatically for that. Therefore, you can guarantee that even when your data logger temperature changes temperature, it’s compensating for that. There will be no drift in the measurement temperature that you are measuring at the hot junction at the product level.

Data logger temperature change over process time, with and without cold junction compensation, measuring a stable process temperature of 1470°F | Image Credit: PhoenixTM, taken from Achieving Accurate Measurements in Real Heat Treat Production in the March print edition of Heat Treat Today.

Heather Falcone: That was the first time that I had read about the cold junction compensation and why it’s so critical, especially when we’re doing TUS activities.

Steve Offley: With TUS, the accuracy of both the data or the field testing instrument, or the data logger and the thermocouple, are critical to the quality of the test data that you are collecting and obviously trying to comply with the very stringent requirements of the AMS and the CQI-9 standards.

In our case, where we are going through the furnace, we have a worst-case scenario because the data logger is naturally going to change in temperature. But even if we take the scenario to the shop floor, and we are doing an external temperature uniformity survey, the data logger that is sitting outside the furnace, cold junction compensation is still critical for that because within a working day, the floor temperature is generally going to be changing.

Events on the shop floor, like opening the furnace activity on the shop floor, are going to change that temperature. I’ve been in many plants where seasonal changes can make a significant difference to the temperature into which you are taking the temperature. It won’t be the first time I’m sure that people have taken equipment out a car after having traveled for many miles in the early hours of the morning only to realize that the data logger temperature may not be at room temperature. You have to be very careful that you have a stable piece of equipment and that the cold junction is working correctly.

It’s important to read the user manual because there’s often a very critical step to make sure that you are either calibrating the equipment in a real-life environment where the temperature change may be, or ensuring sure that your system has got cold junction compensation. Otherwise, what you believe is a true measurement and accurate, may be the calibration laboratory accuracy where the temperature is controlled very, very strictly. In a real life situation, you may not be seeing exactly the same results.

Heather Falcone: It is really important to consider because there are specific accuracy considerations for AMS2750 and CQI-9.

Steve Offley: I often make an analogy to racing. The Formula One racing cars are tuned up to perform highly on a racetrack environment. They can do 200 miles an hour, having been finely tuned, and they work well. If you take that same racing car off the road into the countryside, it is not going to be working quite as effectively.

The same can be said for data logger technology. A data logger that works well in a calibration laboratory and under fairly safe conditions may or may not be working as effectively on the shop floor, particularly when you consider the variation and the challenges that that environment will bring to a measuring system like this.

Linear Interpolation Correction Factor Method (27:22)

Heather Falcone: Can you explain how you use the linear interpolation correction factor method, because that’s one of the only that is allowed by AMS2750, and why it is beneficial to your data quality?

Steve Offley: We discussed the nominal requirements for the data log accuracy for its measurement, but for AMS2750, logger correction factors and also thermocouple correction factors can be applied to the test data that you are collecting with your monitoring system.

Firstly, for the data logger, we can create a data logger correction factor file, which basically shows the correction factors that need to be applied to each of the separate channels of the data logger for the data that you are collecting. Inside the data logger, we store the calibration information that was gleaned in the calibration laboratory. That can then generate an automatic calibration template, which can be automatically applied to each one of the channels on the data logger automatically as part of the test routine.

The last thing we want to do is to make some error by transferring raw data manually from a spreadsheet into a piece of software. So, the nice thing about that is that it’s automatically applying the pre-programmed offsets from the calibration routine in the laboratory itself.

Secondly, with the thermocouple, we can take a calibrated thermocouple where there will be a nominal reading at two ends of the thermocouple, and you then get the average correction factor. In some circumstances, people will apply a thermocouple correction factor of one nominal temperature below the test level that they are applying. At Phoenix, we calibrate the thermocouples across the complete temperature range of the data logger. Then, we apply what we call the linear interpretation method. What that means is that between each calibration point, we can calculate, using a linear regression line, the true correction factor at any temperature over the measurement range of the device itself.

The linear interpolation schematic showing thermocouple correction factors across the full calibration range | Image credit: PhoenixTM, taken from Achieving Accurate Measurements in Real Heat Treat Production in the March print edition of Heat Treat Today.

It cannot go beyond the bounds of the upper and lower limit, as extrapolation is not allowed as it says in the standard. But within the upper and lower bounds, we can interpolate linearly between each data point. There is a tight 140° between each point that we can then ensure that we are correcting for or playing the correct correction factor at each temperature from start to finish, not a nominal value over the whole range. In our view, that gives a far more accurate interpretation of the corrected data over the complete working range of the system as opposed to a single nominal value.

Final Thoughts (31:09)

Heather Falcone: We have talked about a variety of topics: thru-processing monitoring, thermal protection at the data logger, the benefits of making sure that you apply cold junction correction, and the specific accuracy considerations that we have to make sure we bundle in all together. What is the big takeaway you want to leave us with?

Steve Offley: Be careful you do not assume that the condition of operation in the calibration of laboratory is going to be reproduced on the shop floor because the conditions are very different. This comes back to the argument for the importance of cold junction compensation. If you are using technology or a data logger, check with the manual for what cold junction compensation should be applied and if there are any steps you need to make to ensure that that is applied correctly on the shop floor. If you do not, there is a high risk that what you think is accurate data may or may not be if you have a situation where your data logger temperature is varying with time, either in process or even on the shop floor with changing environmental conditions.

Heather Falcone: In the end, we want to make sure that we’re making good parts, and this sounds like a great system to make sure that you’re getting as accurate as possible.

Steve Offley: Quality data at the end of the day is essential for you to understand what your process is doing. It’s no good relying on data you cannot trust. Take that extra time to investigate and put steps in place to make sure that you are measuring what you think you are measuring at the hot junction and that the cold junction is being considered as part of that measurement process.​

About the Guest

Dr. Steve Offley
Product Marketing Manager
PhoenixTM Ltd.

Dr. Steve Offley, aka “Dr.O” is a product marketing manager with PhoenixTM Ltd. with 30 years of experience of temperature monitoring in the industrial thermal processing market.

For more information: Contact Steve Offley at steve.offley@phoenixtm.com.

Heat Treat Radio #131: Beyond Calibration — Real-World Accuracy in Heat Treat Measurement Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #130: AMS2750 Pyrometry Best Practices

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO

Heat Treat Radio host Heather Falcone is joined by Andrew Bassett, president of Aerospace Testing and Pyrometry, for a deep dive into AMS2750 and best practices for managing pyrometry compliance. Drawing on more than 35 years of hands-on experience and his role on the AMS2750 writing team, Bassett explains how the specification has evolved and why pyrometry continues to drive a majority of audit findings. The conversation explores common compliance pitfalls, practical system-level solutions, and how heat treaters can better prepare for audits without over testing. Falcone and Bassett also discuss the value of industry involvement in shaping standards that directly impact daily heat treating operations.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:04)

Heather Falcone: Hi, I’m Heather Falcone, and welcome to Heat Treat Radio. Today we are talking about AMS2750, and the best practice to manage pyrometry compliance. Joining me today is Andrew Bassett, president of Aerospace Testing and Pyrometry. Andrew has more than 35 years of experience working alongside manufacturers, captives, and commercial heat treaters to ensure their testing calibration and pyrometry programs meet the demands of industry specifications like AMS2750 without losing sight of how shops actually operate.

Aerospace Testing and Pyrometry (ATP) provides accredited testing, calibration, and pyrometry services nationwide that support heat treaters and aerospace manufacturers across compliance, audit readiness, and ongoing system integrity. The company also developed the Aerospace Compliance System (ACS), a software platform designed to support compliance and documentation requirements tied to testing and pyrometry programs.

Andrew is deeply involved in the aerospace, metals, and engineering committee responsible for writing AMS2750 specification and is an active contributor within the Nadcap Heat Treat Task Group. He brings practical systems level views of quality that go beyond checklists and audits.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, other than my delightful intro. There’s more about you, your industry involvement, and about ATP.

Andrew Bassett: I’ve been involved with pyrometry for 35 years now. My involvement with pyrometry started with a family-owned business. About the time when the Nadcap process was coming to fruition, some of my mentors, who are still my mentors today, dragged me to my first Nadcap meeting and said, “Well, if you’re going to do this pyrometry stuff, then you better learn it.”

Off I went to Hartford, Connecticut for my first understanding of Nadcap and how much pyrometry is a big part of the thermal processing industry. From that point forward, I dove into the specifications and wanted to be a part of a solution rather than contributing to the problem.

I got involved with AMS2750 and AMEC. When I showed up to my first meeting, the chairman at the time wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there. After explaining what I do and my desire to join the 2750 team, he said absolutely, because at that point, I was the only person in the sub-team that had hands-on experience in pyrometry and was writing the standard. I’m the one that actually picks up the thermocouple, sticks it inside a furnace, and knows what the real world is. Thankfully the chairman saw that and said, “You need to be a part of this.”

I started Aerospace Testing and Pyrometry (ATP) in 2007. When I first started the company, I wanted to dedicate my focus on helping our clients succeed, and make sure that we are the industry experts, providing the customer service that they deserve. I wanted to look at what the specification allows for frequency reductions and stop over testing the equipment, while staying within the compliance requirements of the standards.

AMS2750 is not the only pyrometry specification out there. We then got involved with the other aerospace prime specifications, ensuring our customers maintained compliance to those as well.

We have branched out since those early days of 2007, which consisted of me running around the country, taking care of pyrometry. Now we have 28 people in the business and multiple offices coast to coast with a great team behind us that shares the same vision, ensuring pyrometry service is our ultimate focus for our clients.

Heather Falcone: What is really important about that is that, as a former heat treater actively helping the heat treat industry now, there is not one system that puts all of these standards and specifications together. Companies have their records, data collection, and everything is all separate.

What is ACS? (5:37)

Heather Falcone: Tell us a little bit about ACS and how this software helps with this issue.

Andrew Bassett: The dream of the aerospace compliance software came out of us doing things the old-fashioned way, entering calibration data into an Excel spreadsheet, which enables the human factor and leads to human errors. When it comes to compliance audits, human errors cannot happen. So we tightened up our processes in the Excel world, but I knew there had to be a better way.

That is how we started down the road of developing aerospace compliance software. The idea was that it was going to be strictly an ATP tool to use for my technicians and the team to use the software. But the industry is small enough that people started hearing about what we were doing. Clients began requesting to be able to use the software. That is how the system has grown to where it is today. 

Back in my early days in pyrometry when I started ATP, I would literally build pyrometry compliance notebooks, old fashioned binders. When we would get a new client, I would go buy a bunch of notebooks from Staples and put in their little dividers of a pyrometry program together. We would have information and specifications about their furnace, calibration reports, SAT reports, TUS reports, thermocouple control logs, etc. That’s where ACS has now been built, replacing my old notebooks.

Now we have a system that’s 100% not just a pyrometry tool — it’s also a compliance tool. New features we have added have a focus on compliance, just not pyrometry-related tools. We now have tools for preventive maintenance leak rate testing checks that are required and controlling your thermocouple replacement schedule. It’s bigger than a pyrometry tool now.

This software has now expanded across multiple industries, not just in heat treating and thermal processing, but also chemical processing, NDT, composites, etc. It is a fully compliant software for multiple industries.

Heather Falcone: It’s meant to be that holistic, wraparound software for your quality folks to have someplace safe that all their data can get stored, aggregated, and usable.

Andrew Bassett: It’s also and most importantly a self-checking software to not only the industry specifications, but client internal specifications. It doesn’t have to be solely what AMS2750 says. It could be 2750 or GEs requirements, or Boeing’s requirement, or an internal spec. It will parse all that information to make sure it’s compliant to those standards, and it’s completed faster than you can blink your eye.

AMS2750 (9:20)

Click the image to get a deep dive into AMS2750F fundamentals, as Andrew breaks down the core requirements of AMS2750F.
Click the image to learn about navigating AMS2750F compliance challenges.
Click on the image to understand the critical role of Temperature Uniformity Surveys (TUS) in ensuring repeatable heat treating processes under AMS2750F

Heather Falcone: Can you talk about AMS2750, how it has evolved beyond I think what many of us ever thought it would be, and some best practices on how you can best get your arms around that standard and manage that day to day?

Andrew Bassett: When I got into the industry, we were at Rev C, AMS2750C, and those who’ve been around long enough to know that revision of the spec was the Bible. You gave it to a hundred different people and you got a hundred different interpretations.

It was very unclear on the spec. The iterations from there have gotten better, with 2750D and then the major changes going into E, then all the way up to our current state of Rev H. It’s now more clear, though there are still some confusing parts. My goal personally is to make sure that document is clear and understandable. Even if it’s 300 pages and we use stick figures and crayons to explain what the intent is — I’m okay with that. So it shouldn’t be a document that is hard to understand. The aerospace standards for heat treating are fairly clear on the intent of the spec, but for some reason, pyrometry has always been this scary black hole that you have to try to figure it out. I’m looking forward to the day where that is not the case.

Click on the image above to check out Heat Treat Radio #91 where Andrew demystifies one of AMS2750’s most critical yet often misunderstood specs: the ±0.1°F requirement.

Coming to a understanding of that specification is not easy to do. Understanding what the intent and the requirements are takes some good studying, as well as getting the intimate training of that specification. 

We do provide pyrometry training, and when I first started doing it, it was a 6- to 8-hour day class, the 30,000-foot level. Over the last several years, I’ve broken it now into a two-day class. My PowerPoint presentation has expanded to 168 slides when the spec is only 57 pages. But now I’m doing more of a crop-dusting training level so everybody can understand it. That is extremely helpful for suppliers that need to meet that standard.

Heather Falcone: Interpretation is key for suppliers, understanding how the standard applies to their shop, their floor — that’s a real challenge.

Andrew Bassett: The specification is just not a North American spec. It’s a global specification, and it’s not even just an aerospace standard anymore. It’s gone into the commercial world, the FDA. Now, if you’re doing heat treatment of dental drill bits or knee replacement parts, anything that’s metal, the FDA now requires compliance to AMS2750. Having someone walk you through the standard and reaching out, there are many ways to figure out the intent of the spec and how it applies to each organization.

Best Practices in Managing the Beast (14:40)

Heather Falcone: What are some best practices in managing this if you have to integrate AS, ISO, Nadcap? You have your whole QMS, and then you have 2750, P10TF3, etc. How do you do it?

Andrew Bassett: That’s a huge undertaking. My experience over the years is diving in with our clients and finding out what types of heat treating they are doing. I like to find out who they are heat treating parts for, who are the clients, where are the parts ending up? There could be POs coming in for the clients to heat treat “X” part, and maybe they are not doing their due diligence and the part is actually going to GE Aviation. Well, GE Aviation has their own pyrometry requirements that are offset from AMS2750 or Saffron or any of the other aerospace primes that may have a requirements from a pyrometry standpoint.

So first gathering that information altogether and making sure you are constantly up to date of what you’re processing is critical. From there, with the aerospace compliance software, now that tool can be utilized to manage all your requirements, from your calibrations, your TUS, your SATs, everything can be managed in one location.

For instance, if you’re doing work for GE, and you have to follow their requirements of P10TF3. GE does not have anything in their specification that talks about the alternate SAT that’s specified in AMS2750, but GE also do work that needs to comply with that standard. So this tool is going to keep you on track. This kind of management tool is cabale of managing that for you, so nothing gets missed.

Once that knowledge base is put together and we have a clear path of what needs to be done from the heat treater or the captive shops standpoint of who they are processing work for, then you can use something like ACS that can manage that whole aspect for you.

How Does ACS Work with Other Systems? (17:06)

Heather Falcone: From what I understand, ACS is plug and play. It comes on-site, ready to go as a standalone tool. But how does it also work with other systems that you might have?

Andrew Bassett: ACS is a standalone system. People have access to it; we have a tiered subscription for it depending on what level of the ACS you want. We have also been working with a few industry giants out there to integrate ACS software with certain systems that help manage heat treat processes. There will be an integration point there where ACS will be able to make sure that jobs don’t get processed if TUS or calibration or SATs are past due for heat treat equipment. They won’t be able to enter a job into that piece of equipment. It will stop them from putting something that shouldn’t be going into a furnace. These are some of the features that we will be integrating in 2026 where we’ll be able to work with other software solution providers out there in the heat treating realm to make sure everybody is looking at the same thing.

Heather Falcone: The reason that we want those lockouts in place is because we are trying to avoid NCRs during our audits. We’re trying to get NCRs that will be value-add, not something that we knew we should have been doing and were not. The whole point is to better the company so that we do not have a bunch of pyrometry NCRs during our audits.

Common NCRs for Pyrometry (19:08)

Heather Falcone: What are the top NCRs that you’re seeing for pyrometry currently?

Andrew Bassett: It has been well documented through the Nadcap process that 80% of NCRs actually do come from pyrometry. That has always baffled me, especially being a member of AMS2750 sub-team that writes the standard. What have we done as a team to fail the suppliers out there by not writing clear consistency?

Over the last two revisions, I think many requirements have been clarified. But there are still some pyrometry-related issues that I still see. For example, you may have your preventive maintenance or unscheduled maintenance that is being completed to a piece of equipment. You have a requirement to have that maintenance documented and then approved by a by someone from quality to make sure that no further pyrometry testing is required. Sometimes those logs are missed, or possibly a maintenance manager verifies a door seal was replaced, but then quality does not sign off and date that log.

That is an example of an issue that we identified and put into ACS. Now you can keep that preventive maintenance program in ACS for that particular piece of equipment. With unscheduled maintenance, when the maintenance is completed, it automatically shoots an email to the quality team to have them review and ensure no pyrometry requirements are missed.

That’s an example of one of those top NCRs that you always see with Nadcap. We saw the need and created a solution to that with ACS.

Benefits of Getting Involved (21:11)

Heather Falcone: We want to make sure that everybody can get more involved in shaping the face of compliance so that they do not become a victim of it. How can everybody, including captives, get more involved, and why is that valuable to their bottom line?

Andrew Bassett: This is something I preach constantly with our client base. If you’re Nadcap accredited, firstly, go to a meeting. Learn, be present. You have a say. I’ve been going to Nadcap meetings for 30+ years now, and even though I’m not a supplier, I’m not an aerospace prime, I’m a guest that that shows up. But I keep going and I raise my voice and share my concerns with the group at Nadcap and with the suppliers. Having that voice is important. I know that suppliers need to get more involved. I know it’s an expense to send several people from a company out to a Nadcap meeting, but it’s money well spent when you get involved with AMEC and with creating the specifications.

I had this myth early on in my career that this golden group of aerospace gods were creating standards. When I showed up to the meeting, there were more suppliers there writing the standards than there were the primes. It was amazing to see that we have people that are in the industry that do the heat treating or in the metallurgist or for these organizations that are in charge of the specs. It’s the everyday heat treater, the people with boots on the ground, so to speak, that get involved. So getting involved with AMEC, getting involved with Nadcap, that’s key to any success when it comes to compliance and having that say in writing standards that you know what you’re going to have to comply with.

Heather Falcone: Absolutely. They give us so many opportunities to get involved. There’s four AMECs a year and three Nadcap meetings.

Andrew Bassett: To me it’s well worth it. At least go to the Nadcap meeting that’s always once a year in Pittsburgh. It is the most well attended meeting typically out of all of them. That one is really going to get your feet wet and get that whole experience of Nadcap.

Heather Falcone: That’s usually where they’re making major decisions, like finalizing checklist changes. Being able to get out in front of that and not just wait to get the email from the automated PRI.

Andrew Bassett: I will move mountains to make sure that I am at every Nadcap meeting. For us, I can take that information for those meetings for my clients that don’t end up going and be able to disseminate that information. It doesn’t matter if it’s pyrometry or heat treating or whatever that’s coming out and say, this is coming down the pike. Where do we need to tighten some things up?

Developing Compliance Software For Complex Specifications (25:46)

Heather Falcone: Most of the time I’ve seen when I’m going in to see a heat treater that their compliance program is great at a base level, but there’s too many pieces. So what has that been like trying to develop a compliance software for literally one of the most technically complex and arguably important specifications in our industry?

Andrew Bassett: It’s been a challenge for sure. With AMS2750, at one point it was starting to be updated every two years. Thankfully, we have four developers on our software team, so all the developing for us is in-house. Being on the forefront of changes by attending Nadcap meetings and being a part of AMEC, we can jump right into development and be ready for the update.

Future Specifications and Revisions (27:30)

Heather Falcone: We are on Rev H — what’s next? Is there another spec change on the horizon?

Andrew Bassett: Letter J is on the horizon. We did start working on it. Once the spec is released, the team keeps a parking lot of issues that come up. Then we just basically put it on a storyboard, and when we’re ready to start working on them again, we start working on it. The changes over the last two revisions on G and H, have been minor. It was the first time in the history of the specification, back at Rev G, that there were change bars for the first time.

A change bar is on the left-hand side of the document, indicating where we changed something in the spec. Prior to that, we rewrote the spec and people had to read the whole thing to know what had changed.

I don’t see a time where we’re ever going to have a complete overhaul rewrite of the spec in the future. So yes, we are working on Rev J. These updates will be more clarifications that have sprung up over the last several years. We were trying to put one out every two years to keep up to date. The aerospace community, Nadcap, and AMEC, they were getting a little antsy that we were writing it so quickly, so we put a little pause on that.

We did jump back into it a couple weeks ago. We had our team meeting and worked out a few more issues that are out there. Not a big major overhaul, more clarifications and trying to get more intention of what the requirements that we’re writing.

From a Nadcap standpoint, with any changes to industry specifications, there will be updates on new checklist revisions. That’s always a grinding process to get a checklist that everyone’s going to be happy with. I did not yet look at the agenda for the next meeting in February in San Francisco, but it seems like every time we do have a meeting, there’s a checklist that we’re working on.

Heather Falcone: That is a great takeaway — get involved, right? Go to the meetings, take your opportunities, get involved with people like Andrew that have been in the industry. It’s a wealth of knowledge, and if we’re not taking advantage of your expertise, your experience, then we’re really missing out on taking knowledge back to our own shops.

Is there anything that you want to leave us with before we close out?

Andrew Bassett: You’re spot on with that. That’s that actually what brings me the most joy of what I do is being able to part the knowledge that I have to my clients. Anytime I meet somebody and we talk pyrometry, my business card comes out and I have my cell phone number on there. I tell them, go ahead and call me, text me, smoke signals, whatever you want to do. If there’s a question you have, I’m more than happy to answer it to the best of my abilities. I mean, I’m only one of 12 people on the team. It’s about parting that knowledge and assisting our clients to be successful and have a great understanding of what the requirements are and really make sure that they understand it.

About the Guest

Andrew Bassett
President
Aerospace Testing & Pyrometry

Andrew Bassett has more than 35 years of experience working alongside manufacturers, captives, and commercial heat treaters to ensure their testing, calibration, and pyrometry programs meet the demands of industry specifications like AMS2750 without losing sight of how shops operate. Aerospace Testing and Pyrometry provides accredited testing, calibration, and pyrometry services that support heat treaters and aerospace manufacturers across compliance, audit readiness, and ongoing system integrity. The company also developed the Aerospace Compliance System, a software platform designed to support compliance and documentation requirements tied to testing and pyrometry programs. Andrew is deeply involved in the Aerospace Metals and Engineering Committee responsible for writing the AMS2750 specification and is an active contributor within the Nadcap Heat Treat Task Group. He brings a practical, systems-level view of quality that goes beyond checklists and audits.

For more information: Contact Andrew at abassett@atp-cal.com

Heat Treat Radio #130: AMS2750 Pyrometry Best Practices Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #129: Understanding US Energy Initiatives and Their Impact on Heat Treating

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT TECH

In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, Doug Glenn sits down with Michael Mouilleseaux of Erie Steel Treating to examine U.S. energy initiatives and their implications for the heat treating industry. Mouilleseaux, who also chairs the Metal Treating Institute Regulatory Task Force, provides context on energy costs, emissions data, and the practical challenges associated with electrification and alternative fuels in industrial heating. The discussion explores how policy decisions affect energy reliability and day-to-day manufacturing operations, and whether current approaches align with the operational realities of heat treating.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction

Doug Glenn: Today, we are welcoming back a guest that we’ve had on Heat Treat Radio several times: Michael Mouilleseaux from Erie Steel Treating in the Toledo, Ohio area. We are going to be discussing energy policies that are impacting captive heat treaters, commercial heat treaters, heat treating industry suppliers, all of those folks — should be a pretty interesting conversation.

Doug Glenn (host on the left) and Michael Mouilleseaux of Erie Steel Ltd (right)

Greenhouse Gas Emissions By the Numbers (2:00)

Doug Glenn: Michael has some pretty interesting statistics about pollution, sustainability, and energy. Could you share some of those stats with us?

Michael Mouilleseaux: The United States represents about 11% of the total greenhouse gas emissions — total. China represents 30%. India is almost equivalent with us. They are just under 10%. 2007 is said to be the peak year for greenhouse has emissions worldwide. Since 2007, the U.S. has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 15%. During that time, we have increased our energy production by 45%. Obviously, we’re doing something right.

In that same timeframe, the rest of the world has increased their greenhouse gas emissions 20%. When we talk about what is it that the U.S. is doing and what more do we need to be doing — we are doing more than anyone else.

In the U.S., what are the component parts of these greenhouse gas emissions? They are transportation, electric generation, and industry, and they are all about 25% or 30%.

Heat treating as a small part of industry represents 0.3% of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Doug Glenn: Is that across all of the component parts?

Michael Mouilleseaux: That is across everything, 0.3%. And yet, we are going to have the conversation, “Why us?”

Fuel Costs (4:07)

Michael Mouilleseaux: In the U.S., natural gas costs less than $3 per million BTU. In Germany, it’s $12 per million BTU.

Doug Glenn: Which is four times the rate.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Correct, four times the rate. Now, there was a time in the U.S. when gas was that expensive, and I remember that. That was not a fun time to be in the heat treating industry.

When we say gas cost $3 million BTU and $12 million BTU, that’s the commodity cost — that doesn’t include transportation. Electricity in the U.S. for industrial customers averages a little over 8 cents a kilowatt hour. Germany is the largest economy in the European Union. In Germany, electricty costs over 30 cents a kilowatt hour.

A couple of interesting facts as we talk about what the legislation is and how it affects us: 40% of the U.S. Congress members are lawyers. Less than 2% of the members are engineers. Here, we have this highly technical discussion about clean air, thermodynamics, and these models that are used to generate the information that the industry is being held accountable for. Yet less than 2% of the members of Congress even understand it.

Learn how the DOE identified heat treating as a target for decarbonization efforts. Click on the image above to read Michael Mouilleseaux’s original analysis of what this means for the industry.

So how did this whole thing get started? It goes back to the Clean Air Act of 1970, which was a national air quality standard that named six pollutants and covered the United States only. We’re going to come back to this point because it’s significant.

In 1990, the Clean Air Act was amended by Congress, and now included 180 pollutants.

Doug Glenn: So it went from 6 to 180 pollutants.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Do we remember what the seventies were like? If you do, you can remember seeing televisions shots of Southern California — you could not see anything because the smog was so bad. So, was this legislation justified? I would say that it absolutely was.

Doug Glenn: That and the Cuyahoga River being on fire.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Exactly, so it was very important. MTI has this initiative in California. Why have we focused on a single state? It was the clean air acts in California in the 1960s that spurred the U.S. Congress to generate the Clean Air Act, which now has nationwide application.

Doug Glenn: I’ve heard it said that what starts in California spreads to the rest of the nation and the rest of the world.

Michael Mouilleseaux: It absolutely does. So we have the Clean Air Act. Secondly, in 2007 — we have gone from 1970 to 2007 — the Obama Administration made decisions based on two pieces of information: a Supreme Court ruling, and information that was generated by what’s called the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel.

Doug Glenn: Okay.

Michael Mouilleseaux: In this panel — a highly politicized body, by the way — they came up with the information that said that with a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the earth is going to heat up. If it heats up, the solar ice caps will melt. Sea levels will rise, we are going to have monsoons. A very catastrophic scenario was presented by this panel.

Based upon that, the Obama Administration EPA had what they called an endangerment finding. Endangerment is not a scientific term, it’s non-engineering term. It’s a legal term. It means risk of harm, not actual harm, but a risk of harm. The EPA took this information and said there’s a risk of harm to the U.S. population, and as a result of that, we are going to implement legislation.

The first legislation that came down the pike was the Clean Power Plan Act. EPA mandated that the states had to regulate the CO2 emissions of the power plants. At that time, the regulation mandated that by 2030, the greenhouse gas emissions had to be reduced 30%. That’s 23 years from 2007 to 2030. It seems almost reasonable.

Doug Glenn: Just to be clear, they said you need to reduce it by 30%, not to 30%. In other words, you don’t need a 70% reduction, you just need to reduce it 30%.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Correct.

Now we fast forward to 2021, and the Biden Administration comes in, it’s difficult to describe this and not sound political, but the years are what they are, and the people that were in power are who they were — this is the result of that. In 2021, just as Biden comes into office, he issues an executive order mandating a clean energy economy.

He charged the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy to develop a plan to further the reduction in greenhouse gases. In effect, it affected all three segments of the U.S. economy that generate greenhouse gases. With the previous Power Plant Act, greenhouse gases had to be reduced 30% by 2030. Under the Biden Administration, that regulation was changed to an 85% reduction, and you had to have net zero emissions by 2050.

This applied to the power plants. It applied to automobiles, the transportation sector. That’s where you saw all of these incentives that are in place. There was a huge push for electric cars. If you recall, 40% of the vehicles sold by 2030 were to have been electric vehicles, and by 2050, it was supposed to be an all-electric economy. Same thought process going into play there as it applies to the industrial sector.

There were five segments of the industrial sector: iron and steel, manufacturing, chemical processing, petroleum processing, and food and beverage. All five of these segments of the industrial sector were subject to the same mandate. Thatis, that by 2030, an 85% reduction in greenhouse hases and net zero by 2050.

Four Pillars of Mitigation (13:09)

Michael Mouilleseaux: That administration came up with what they call the Four Pillars of Mitigation. The pillars of mitigation were energy efficiency, the use of low carbon fuels, carbon caption, and electrification.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy

We ask then, “Why heat treating?” As we mentioned, it’s only 0.3% of greenhouse gas emissions across the five target areas. Where did heat treating come into play? Well, there was a symposium held by the Department of Energy in the summer of 2023. In that symposium, they further defined the segments within these five areas that I spoke of, and in the iron and steel industry, they made the determination that 63% of the energy that’s used in the iron and steel industry is in process heating. Then they further segmented it, and they said heat treating is a significant sector in process heating.

Why is an industry responsible for just 0.3% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in the crosshairs? Click on the image above to read the full analysis.

So almost as an afterthought, heat treating got pulled into this.

Doug Glenn: Quick clarification question on that. When they talk about process heating and the iron steel, are they talking about steel making or everything downstream from it?

Michael Mouilleseaux: Both.

Doug Glenn: Okay, alright.

Michael Mouilleseaux: It’s all inclusive.

Pillar One: Energy Efficiency (14:46)

Michael Mouilleseaux: How do the mitigating pillars apply to heat treating? Let’s look at energy efficiency. I had a conversation with several furnace manufacturers and my question to them was, “if we looked at equipment that’s 20 or 25 years old and compared it today, how much more efficient is the equipment today?” We are talking state-of-the-art equipment. How much more efficient is that equipment than what we had that’s 20 years old? The answer is that the maximum would be 20%.

Doug Glenn: 20% more efficient.

Michael Mouilleseaux: 20% more efficient at maximum, not average. That’s the absolute maximum. So we’re not going to get our 85% reduction in greenhouse gases by a 20% improvement in efficiency.

Pillar Two: Low Carbon Fuels (15:40)

Michael Mouilleseaux: The next element was low carbon fuels.

Doug Glenn: That’s pillar number two.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Pillar number two. After you make your way through what they were talking about — and there’s some discussion about biofuels and things of that nature — at the end of the day, it’s all about hydrogen. Their goal was to utilize hydrogen in place of natural gas as fuel source. Is that technically feasible? The answer to that is yes. Where you run into the problem is how practical is it?

Firstly, is there a distribution center, a methodology for hydrogen? Could you just put it in in the natural gas pipelines and use it? Not as they’re currently configured; it would require some work.

Steam methane reforming / Source: U.S. Department of Energy

Secondly, how are you going to generate all of this hydrogen? Today the way that hydrogen is generated is a method called steam methane reform in which you take methane, which is natural gas, and you heat it by using natural gas, and then you inject steam. In doing so, you strip away the hydrogen. Steam H2O and you strip away the hydrogen from the oxygen. The oxygen you can put back in the atmosphere, and the hydrogen you capture and that’s what you’re going to sell.

The cost of that today is about $15 per million BTUs.

Doug Glenn: Regular natural gas we said was less $3 per million BTUs. So it’s a five times increase in cost.

Michael Mouilleseaux: There we go. Now the other thing is you are using 2.5 million BTUs of methane or natural gas to make 1 million BTUs of hydrogen. So, if you’re not an engineer, you are just fine with that. But to those of us that that can do a little bit more than just add and subtract, it makes no sense. It’s nonsensical.

In addition, there are no facilities that could generate the amount of hydrogen that we’d be needed to supply industry.

Doug Glenn: You’re using two times the fuel to make it, but also, doesn’t hydrogen have like a quarter of the BTUs of natural gas?

Michael Mouilleseaux: There we go. Now the other thing is you are using 2.5 million BTUs of methane or natural gas to make 1 million BTUs of hydrogen. So, if you’re not an engineer, you are just fine with that. But to those of us that can do a little bit more than just add and subtract, it makes no sense. It’s nonsensical.

In addition, there are no facilities that could generate the amount of hydrogen that we’d be needed to supply industry.

Doug Glenn: You’re using two times the fuel to make it, but also, doesn’t hydrogen have like a quarter of the BTUs of natural gas?

Michael Mouilleseaux: There is another way of generating hydrogen, and that is electrolysis. You take water with a sufficient amount of electrical input. You can strip the hydrogen off the oxygen, you can use a membrane sieve, you can separate them out.  This is a well-known, well-established method that has been done for quite a long time.

Two considerations with this method. Firstly, where does the electricity that you use come from? In this country today, 40% of our electricity is generated from natural gas. So if you are going to say that we are going to reduce the CO2 output and you’re utilizing natural gas to generate electricity, there is an issue there. The second consideration is the cost. The cost today of electrolysis-generated hydrogen is about $60 per million BTUs.

Doug Glenn: In summary, it’s $3 per million BTUs for natural gas, $15 per million BTUs for methane separated, and $60 per million BTUs for electrolysis separated.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Correct, that’s today. The industrial roadmap that the Biden Administration came up with determined we would use green energy — wind turbines and solar panels. We all know that those energy sources are free because the wind blows for nothing and the sunlight comes out and graces us with its presence every day. The administration wanted to get a million BTUs of hydrogen, and the cost of that to be half of what the current cost of natural gas is.

Doug Glenn: Which would mean about a dollar and a half.

Michael Mouilleseaux: If that isn’t irrational exuberance, I don’t know what is.

Doug Glenn: You’re right.

Pillar Three: Carbon Capture (21:16)

Michael Mouilleseaux: The third pillar is carbon capture. Carbon capture is a technology where you would take the CO2 that’s emitted from a combustion process or other processes, and in utilizing molecular sieves and such, you would trap that. Sometimes they will generate dry ice out of it. Other times, you might just inject it into the into the crust of the earth. Today there are 54 carbon capture operations operating worldwide. Worldwide. In the United States, it’s less than 10. All of these things have to do with petroleum processing. They’re taking natural gas wells, let’s say, and burn the natural gas. This will generate the energy that can be used to generate these sequestration efforts. That’s how it’s paid for.

There is nothing available today on a level that you would be using in a heat treating operation. The carbon capture plants take up acres. This is not a small confined operation.

Doug Glenn: So once again, doable but not practical.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Correct.

Pillar Four: Electrification (22:57)

Michael Mouilleseaux: The last pillar is electrification. We all know there are electric furnaces today. We have had many presentations by furnace manufacturers over the years.  Most recent that I have seen is that an electric furnace equivalent to a gas fired furnace probably costs 10% less.

You might make the case that the maintenance on that would be less because you don’t have as many moving parts and gas trains, etc. But the operating cost might be three or four times what the operating cost is for a gas-fired furnace. As such, it’s an economic issue.

Doug Glenn: Why do we say three to four times the cost? Is that based on the cost of electricity?

Michael Mouilleseaux: The cost of electricity, yes. It’s three or four times as much. We talked about the fact that the average cost of industrial electricity is around 8.5 cents in the U.S. It varies from 5 to 25 cents. We are just looking at the average.

In addition, if you take all of the gas-fired equipment in this country and power it with electricity, how much would you need? The answer to that is that you would need a significant amount, and we do not have that amount of electricity available.

Click on the image above to dive deeper into how the Four Pillars of Mitigation impact heat treating operations. Discover the practical challenges facing commerical and captive heat treaters.

Doug Glenn: Considering that the hot topic of the day is the data processing centers, they are going to be sucking up a lot more electricity than we have even now. So it’s not like the electricity is going to be readily available within the next five years or so.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Precisely. You look at these data processing centers and predominantly they are using natural gas-fired turbines to generate the electricity for them. Many of them have their own power plants. They have micro grids. There are two or three of them that have made applications to the NRC to use small modular nuclear reactors. These individuals are from Silicon Valley who typically have been green. Yet they recognize that green is not going to be the key to success.

Even in their case, the practicalities of dependable cost-effective power trumps the need to be green or at least appear to be compliant with all of our climate requirements.

Effects on the Industry (26:06)

Michael Mouilleseaux: What are the effects that these initiatives have on industry? If you think about what we’ve discussed so far, we are talking about destabilizing our industry, as a result of trying to use unproven technologies. Other than electric-powered furnaces, none of these methods currently exist today, either on a scale or are cost effective, that we could use to replace the power that we use in the heat treating industry.

So when we say a five times or a twenty times increase in cost,  power is typically about 10% of the cost of a heat treating operation.

Those numbers come from an annual MTI survey. We talk about what costs are involved in the heat treating operation and power is always the second or third cost. From the MTI survey, it averages 10%.

If I have a captive operation, it’s different. I happened to have some experience in the captive industry. I ran what was arguably the largest captive heat treating operation in North America, in Syracuse, New York. We had 15 multi roll pushers. To those people, would it matter if the cost of energy went up five times or more? It absolutely would. Power was a huge concern and we made many efforts in attempts to reduce the amount of power that we needed to do.

Doug Glenn: You were probably happy if you could get it down a percent or two.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Yes, and that was one of those installations where efficiency was the way that we went about doing that. When you have a heat treating operation that’s supporting a large manufacturing operation, the heat training operation is never the pinch point in getting out production. It’s always the manufacturing operations. We ran extremely inefficiently to support those operations.

We talked about destabilizing these things. The implementation schedule that we’re talking about is unrealistic — achieving an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas in 10 years and none of these technologies that we’ve talked about is going to achieve that.

It’s destabilizing because it’s unproven, it’s destabilizing because the implementation schedule is unrealistic, and it’s destabilizing because of the increase in cost.

Doug Glenn: There are some who have done this, like in Europe, for example. I believe they have moved in this direction. You were talking about the price of energy over there. What about their efforts?

Michael Mouilleseaux: I’m going to reference Germany, because Germany is 25 or 30% of the European economy. We know that their electric power is four times what it is here. We know that gas is similar. German industry is an absolute powerhouse, or at least it had been.

In recent years, subsequent to the pandemic, their economy went down. They recovered, and since then they have lost industrial output 2% to 3% per year. Right now they are 10% below where they were.

Doug Glenn: Where they were at the bottom of the pandemic?

Michael Mouilleseaux: Not at the bottom, prior to the pandemic. What are the reasons for that? In Germany, do they make the best cars? They certainly think they do. Do they have the best machine tools? They definitely think that they do. Do they have the best chemical processing plants? They definitely think that they do. I know for a fact that BASF, which is a large German chemical processing business, the last two chemical processing plants that they built were in Louisiana, and I don’t believe Louisiana is within the German Democratic Republic.

European heat treaters are already navigating these challenges. Click on the image above to read about how one German company is investing €40M in electric furnace technology for decarbonization.

When you look at that, the German Central Bank, the European Central Bank have all taken a look at these changes. They issue annual reports on the various members of the EU, and every report that has come out in the last three to four years has specifically stated that it’s the high cost of regulation and it’s the high cost of energy that has been the cause for the diminishment in German industrial output.

Doug Glenn: That’s very interesting.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Additionally, when we talk about renewables, you have to understand that there’s a risk of interruption of service. How many interruptions or blackouts have there been in California? We really don’t hear of them in this part of the country because it really doesn’t affect us. But I believe that the number of blackouts in California last year exceeded 100. W do not know the length of these blackouts, but when you have an industrial process that’s going on, it doesn’t take much of an interruption to where everything has to be reset. The potential to have damaged equipment, certainly damaged product, that has to be taken into consideration.

Let’s also consider Portugal, another European country. I believe that 70% of Portugal’s energy is generated by wind power. Earlier this year, Portugal had a two-day blackout nationwide, and it all had to do with the fact that the power is generated by a wind turbine. Neither wind turbines nor solar panels generate alternating current. They all generate direct current. You have to put it through an inverter and it has to be cleaned up.  Here in the U.S. we have 60 cycles per minute. This is our alternating current. In Europe, it’s 50 cycles. There’s not a tremendous amount of variability that’s allowed in that. So when things become off cycle, it shuts down the entire grid, and that’s essentially what happened in Portugal. It took them two days to restart the country.

Consequently, there’s a cost there. I understand what the goal is. I’m just questioning the methodology and how you get there.

Doug Glenn: And the practicality, once again, the practicality of it. If Europe is teaching us anything, they’re showing us the outcomes, whether intended or unintended, of moving in that direction.

Michael Mouilleseaux: In all fairness, it’s moving in that direction too quickly. I don’t think that there are any of us who say that this goal is not admirable or that it’s not something that we want to accomplish. The question becomes how do you go about doing that?

Doug Glenn: Thinking about what’s going on nowadays, there may be different reasons why they’re moving too quickly. I could see in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, why they may be moving quickly away from gas with the whole Russia and Ukraine conflict and the fact that they get most of their gas from there. I can see that and that I would consider to be somewhat of a market effect, even though it’s based on war. It’s not something that was imposed by authorities. It’s an outcome of an event.

You can see why they’d be moving quickly that way. The rest of the country, and the fact that we’re trying to convert so quickly to electricity is self-inflicted by regulation primarily.

Recent Changes in the States (36:00)

Doug Glenn: I know there’s some changes here recently in the states. Can you discuss those?

Michael Mouilleseaux: Almost every initiative and mandate that we have mentioned that happened during the Biden Administration was achieved via executive order. When it comes to executive orders, they can be overturned when you are no longer in office.

I recently looked at a paper that was done by the Institute for Energy Research, and they said that the Trump Administration, through September, had 20 regulatory actions or executive orders that were related to energy production.

Most of them overcame, overturned, rescinded what was in that industrial decarbonization roadmap. There were a couple of initiatives that were actually codified during the Biden administration. Those were codified in the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. In the IRA, they implemented an investment tax credit and a production tax credit concerning renewable energy. The investment tax credit relative to renewable energy gave you a 30% tax break on all investments that were in renewable energy, and the production tax credit gave you a credit for every kilowatt hour of energy that you produced.

If I have a wind turbine that’s generating 200,000 kilowatts, and I’m getting back from the government 3 or 4 cents, and I’ve purchased that equipment at 70% of what it costs, all of a sudden I have the ability to undercut what the current power plants are asking for for the power that they’re generating.

First of all, this is a tremendous displacement of capital. People are going to say, where am I going to put my money? If I put it into this and I’m buying it for 70 cents on the dollar, that’s a pretty good investment and I’m guaranteed that I’m going to get so much money from the federal government for the energy that I generate.

Doug Glenn: This is not the excess energy that you produce. It could be energy that you produce and you use. You’re getting paid by the government to produce your own energy.

Michael Mouilleseaux: This is on an industrial scale. The huge wind farms that you see — they are put in place simply to sell energy to the grid.

The other consequence is that when they are generating electricity, the base load plants using natural gas, they’re not able to sell their power. They have to curtail or shut down. The issue becomes when the wind stops blowing, or the sun is not out, where does that energy come from?

Doug Glenn: The base load.

Michael Mouilleseaux: It has to come from those base load plants. These plants are typically going to run for 80% of the time. If I can run 80% of the time, I know that I can generate this amount of power. I have these costs and this is what we’re going to sell it for. Now all of a sudden, if you’re telling me that I have to do it for 20% of the time, the cost structure changes.

These are all public utilities that are regulated not just federally, but in each state. The regulations are onerous and difficult to understand.

One of the things that you see is that for those of us that purchase power for industrial use, the peak cost of electricity has risen dramatically. The reason for that is they have to have some way that they can recapture these costs.

Doug Glenn: And make up for the fact that they’re not producing the same amount of electricity all the time.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Right. Going back to the investment tax credit and the production tax credit. The big, beautiful bill that was H.R. 1 that was signed on July 4, rescinded these tax credits. It didn’t rescind them immediately though. Most of the rescission takes place in 2027 and 2028. One of the things the Democrats did that was very smart is that they made sure that most, if not many of these renewable energy installations were done in red states. So if you’re going to rescind these acts, it’s going to be very difficult and painful politically for the red state politicians to do that. As a result of that, they didn’t end the credits immediately. They pushed it out.

The incentives for electric cars ended at the end of September 2025. It will be interesting to see what’s going on there. The Europeans have some experience with that. The Germans ended their tax credit and they cut the electric car market in half.

Doug Glenn: We know Elon Musk was not very happy about that.

Michael Mouilleseaux: The investment tax credit and the production tax credit were sunsetted in 2028. But by executive order, the bill did something else — it changed the eligibility requirements for the credits. Previously, under the prior administration, if you had 5% of a project completed, then you were eligible to receive these tax credits. You could have a plan and you could have a place that you wanted to do it. But you did not even need to have purchased the land, you did not need to have purchased the equipment. You just had to have a good idea and you were going to get money for it.

Policy Reversal Timeline

This changed to where the project had to be 20% completed. So now you have to have purchased land. You have to know where you are going to put it. You have to have contracts for equipment. Although the bill didn’t achieve exactly what we were hoping to see, it was successful in that regard.

The last thing this current administration has done, and it may well end up being the most significant, is that the EPA has made a plan to rescind the 2000 endangerment finding.

As we mentioned, the endangerment finding identified greenhouse gases. The original charter of the EPA named 6 pollutants, and this 2007 endangerment finding identified greenhouse gases and specifically CO2 as a pollutant. The reason that I mentioned that the original finding applied to the continental United States is that this finding, the 2007 finding, references global warming, global climate change. One of the things that they are going to use to attempt to overturn this is on the basis that the EPA has simply overreached the original charter.

It’s complicated. In 2014, the activist Supreme Court that we had at that time, did find that it was within the purview of the EPA to control greenhouse gases. On that basis, they said, we have a green light and this is what we’re going to do, and you can see what’s transpired. There was a finding by this current Supreme Court, and it was called the Major Questions Doctrine. And the Major Questions Doctrine says that a regulatory agency cannot dictate policy above and beyond what is in their original charter.

When I said that they are going to go after this agency on the basis that they’re claiming that CO2 should be controlled because it leads to global warming, that is not in the original charter. The original charter says only what happens within the United States.

In addition, the science that was used in the original 2007 endangerment finding was reviewed by this international organization, the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate. This pane did not have singular findings. They had groups of findings. It was science based upon scientific models. The panel said, if this happens, then it would lead to this amount of increase in temperature. If that happens, it could lead to this. There were scenarios within that were many and varied.

The Obama Administration chose not the average scenario, but the worst case scenario. Based upon the worst case, this has been done. The current administration is reviewing that science and they’re saying that there is evidence now that the models that you used did not come to fruition. That’s pretty condemning evidence in and of itself. There’s also new evidence that says that we do not have anywhere near the issue that previously thought. One thing that was never taken into consideration is the resilience of people. For example, if there’s an increase in sea level, maybe people move to higher ground.

There were so many perspectives that were never taken into consideration and we can now see how people react to their environment. That it is nowhere near the difficulty that we thought.

Doug Glenn: We are not going to stand on the seashore and drown as the water creeps up over our nose in over a five-year span. We are going to move.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Having said that, this rescission process is going to take two or three years. The environmental industrial complex is going to do everything within their power to make sure that legally that this doesn’t go through.

Get the latest on how the new administration is reshaping industrial decarbonization policy. Click on the image above to read updates on executive orders and regulatory changes.

The environmental industrial complex is a 100 billion dollar industry composed of thousands of NGOs that are interlocked, intertwined, and there are a hundred thousand people that are involved in this. This is not just the guy on the street corner with a sign that says “save the planet.” This is an industry and it has all of the machinations that would go on, and their self-preservation is number one.

Doug Glenn: They are going to do all they can to maintain the level of crisis in order to keep their business afloat.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Right. If this effort is successful, this will change forever what the EPA will and will not be able to.

It’s very important. As consumers and members of this republic, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that our representatives support this effort so that they know that, although they are up against a significant foe here, they have the support of the people.

What Can We Change in the Short Term? (50:55)

Doug Glenn: Any concept of what we need to do in the short term, over the next couple years or so?

Michael Mouilleseaux: I think that we really need to recodify the EPA charter. If this endangerment finding is overturned, that is one way that this situation could be turned around. The other would be if Congress were to revisit what the mandate for the EPA is and state it in legislation, because if it were stated in legislation, then this this finding is of no consequence at all.

Of course, the difficulty there is that you may get through the house, but you do not have a filibuster-proof Senate. That’s obviously the challenge that we face on this.

Is There a Rational Policy for Transitioning to Non-Fossil Fuels? (51:49)

Michael Mouilleseaux: Is there a rational policy for transitioning to non-fossil fuels? First of all, it’s not a question of should we do this. Global warming is a fact; there’s no denying it. The effects of global warming have yet to be determined. What climate experts do not want to tell us is that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere also enhances farming.

Doug Glenn: It also enhances plant growth.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Exactly. That’s not something that they want to talk about at all. Climate is something that happens over a series of decades. The fact that it’s a hundred degrees today is of no consequence whatsoever or the fact that you’ve had a five-inch rainfall. Just recently in this past spring, you saw on the news that we had monsoons in Pakistan. There was flooding and people died. I happened to be old enough to remember seeing that on the news in the 1960s.

This isn’t something that’s new, the flooding of those deltas, the receding. It’s just part of the cycle of life in that part of the world.

Do renewables have a place in our power system? They absolutely do, but not as a primary source. The other thing about renewables is that, there’s an aphorism that’s used in the industry, and it’s called “dispatchable generation.” Dispatchable generation is what backs up renewable energy when it is not working.

Doug Glenn: It’s the more steady-state energy producers.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Correct. We decided we would do this with batteries. Today, for as many battery plants that have been put in place to back up renewable energy systems, there are still twice as many that utilize water pumping. You pump water to an elevation that’s higher from where there is a hydro plant. Then when you need it, you drain the water through the hydro plant and you generate electricity.

How does that work out? Let’s say I have a renewable power, and I’m going to run a pump to pump water uphill, and then I’m going to allow it to flow down. I’m probably going to have to pump it because you’re not going to get enough gravitational fall in this thing to generate this hydro plant. What are the energy losses in that? 20% or 30% or 40%? Those are the kinds of concepts that you struggle to answer, “how do you make it work?”

Doug Glenn: It’s certainly doable. How do you make it doable and practical?

Michael Mouilleseaux: If an average natural gas power plant generates 800 megawatts, and it takes up 30 acres, that’s stereotypical. 800 megawatts of wind energy takes up about 100,000 acres. That’s a 150 square miles. Some say this land can be used for something else, possibly farmland.

What you can’t use it for is grazing land because those wind turbines negatively affect the animals. I learned that in the early 2000s in Germany when I had work that took me back and forth. The Germans had onshore wind farms and they had discovered that negative effect on the animals at that point in time.

Doug Glenn: The human species also would be driven crazy by them.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Wind farms also denude the land. If you have ever been proximate to a wind farm, how do you live with it? The people that are putting these wind farms in do not live approximate to them.

That’s a wind farm. For 800 megawatts of solar, it’s 10 square miles of land, 30 acres. With the solar panels, you don’t have as much open land at that point, so it really is difficult to use that land for anything.

Final Thoughts (57:22)

Click on the image above to explore Michael Mouilleseaux’s comprehensive analysis of industrial decarbonization policy under the new administration, originally published in Heat Treat Today’s October print edition.

Doug Glenn: Is there anything else, like a near term policy, that could help us out?

Michael Mouilleseaux: In my mind, it’s all about codifying what we’ve done at this point; we cannot leave it to executive orders because those are reversible.

Doug Glenn: Right, and codifying is going to be very difficult, as you already mentioned. We could probably get it through the House at this moment, but probably not the Senate, so it’s going to be difficult.

About the Guest

Michael Mouilleseaux
General Manager
Erie Steel, Ltd

Michael Mouilleseaux is the general manager at Erie Steel, Ltd. He has been at Erie Steel in Toledo, OH since 2006 with previous metallurgical experience at New Process Gear in Syracuse, NY, and as the director of Technology in Marketing at FPM Heat Treating LLC in Elk Grove, IL. Michael attended the stakeholder meetings at the May 2023 symposium hosted by the U.S. DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.

For more information: Contact Michael at mmouilleseaux@erie.com.

Heat Treat Radio #129: Understanding US Energy Initiatives and Their Impact on Heat Treating Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #128: Silicon Carbide Without Transformers: How Is That Possible?

/ CONTROLS TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT TECH

In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, Tony Busch of Control Concepts, Christina Clowes of I Squared R, and Dr. Stephen Feldbauer of Abbott Furnace Company join host Doug Glenn to discuss a new transformer-free approach to electrically heated furnaces. The group walks through how SCR power controllers paired directly with silicon carbide heating elements can reduce system cost, simplify design, and improve control accuracy. They also explore the global adoption of zero-cross technology and its growing relevance in North America.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (0:45)

Doug Glenn: We’re going to be talking about a relatively new combination of two fairly well-known technologies that will help some people save money. Those two technologies are SCR power controllers and silicon carbide heating elements. It’s actually kind of a little case study. If you’ve got an electrically heated furnace, this would be one you’ll want to stay and hear.

Clockwise from top left: Doug Glenn (host), Christina Clowes of I²R Elements Company, Tony Busch of Control Concepts, and Dr. Stephen Feldbauer of Abbott Furnace Company

Our first guest is Tony Busch from Control Concepts. Tony Busch is the North American sales manager for Control Concepts. Next is Christina Clowes, the vice president over at I²R Elements Company. Our final guest is Dr. Stephen Feldbauer, the director of research and development at Abbott Furnace Company.

A Furnace with a New Configuration (1:45)

Doug Glenn: To get a sense of this furnace that we’re talking about, can you describe the situation and this new configuration of power controls for the heating elements?

Steve Feldbauer: What I can say is that this was a new piece of equipment to replace an old technology for a new facility.

Okay, so they were going to move to a new facility and they said, “Hey, we don’t want this old stuff. Let’s look at just buying a new furnace for this application.”

This is for the casting industry. The molds go into the furnace and traverse through; the furnace preheats them so that operators can then pull them out and fill them with metal. So it’s a continuous furnace for mold preheating application for the casting industry.

It was exciting! We had an electrically heated furnace, and then began talking with Tony and Christina. Control Concepts had this concept, no pun intended: Traditionally, design of an electrically heated furnace above a certain temperature (1850 degrees), we use silicon carbide heating elements and — due to resistance changes over time — we have to put transformers in there that allow us to keep upping the voltage and maintain heating capability. Control Concepts said, “Hey, we can take innovate technology and save some money, make things a little easier, and get rid of the transformers.”

And we really had a great outcome.

Doug Glenn: This is a foundry industry application, the preheating of molds, and this is a continuous furnace. You guys, Abbott, obviously won that bid to supply that furnace. I’m sure it was a competitive situation, so congratulations.

Traditional SCR and Silicon Carbide Heating Element Configuration (4:40)

Doug Glenn: So Tony, one of the great features of this Abbott furnace that helped them win this order was this relatively new configuration of the power supplies. as Steve was saying. Tell us a little bit more about the SCRs and the silicon carbide heating elements.

Tony Busch: I think it’s important to understand where we came from and where we are now with this new technology.

In the past, at least in North America, silicon carbide heating elements produce a high temperature, a high current. To help that happen and so you do not have a big, thick gauge wires, a transformer would be added to the design very close to the furnace. This reduces the conductor size. That transformer often was a multi-tap transformer. From a SCR power controller standpoint, you would be controlling the power on the primary side of the transformer, let’s say 480 volt stepping down into 60-70, whatever volts are required for the application. To use a transformer with a power controller, you need phase angle power control.

This is how it has been done in the past with phase angle firing varying every half cycle into the primary of a transformer.

The New Setup (06:09)

Example of SCR power controller units attached directly to industrial furnace. Source: Control Concepts

Doug Glenn: What is the new configuration?

Tony Busch: With the new scheme, we are removing the transformer. Now you have an SCR power controller firing directly into the silicon carbide heating elements.

To do this, you will have to have slightly bigger power controllers, but you’re completely eliminating the transformer and you’re going directly into it. To take it a step further, we use a special firing mode called Fast Zero Cross. This mode satisfies the heating elements.

We are maintaining a very smooth watt density output to the heating elements. You can control it and the power feedback if you need to, which is essentially your unit of measure to control the power, which can be in KW versus voltage or current.

Doug Glenn: That’s on the power side. Control side of things. That’s basically the new arrangement: removal of the transformer; direct feed into the heating element, with some advantages. Christina, how about the heating element? Can you tell us a little bit about the heating element in this situation?

Christina Clowes: This is not a unique heating element in this particular case, because the same heating element configuration probably would’ve been used even if you were using a multi-tap transformer based system.

The key to the operation here is the very rapid switching of full sine waves through the heating elements, where you’re proportioning the “on-to-off” cycles, electrical cycles, so rapidly that the heating element does not have time to respond to the very high instantaneous loadings during each “on” cycle.

For example, in the U.S., typically you are looking at a power supply that’s at 60 hertz, 60 cycles per second. One electrical cycle is one 60th per second, or 16.66 milliseconds. In that case, if you were regulating the outputs from the heating elements to 50%, you would have one cycle on, followed by one cycle off, and that being repeated continually.

The heating element during that one cycle, that 16.66 milliseconds, does not have enough time to respond firmly to that very high loading. As a result, the RMS voltage, the natural average voltage over time, governs the load into the heating elements. So, you can design around systems based on 480 volts but regulate the RMS output on the controller to whatever the heating element needs to generate the amount of power that’s needed by the process.

The control is the key to this operation.

Doug Glenn: Is it possible to use a standard or any type of heating element or do you need a special silicon carbide type?

Christina Clowes: It is not a special silicon carbide. We designed this particular application around the needs of the process, the operating temperature, the specific loading required for the process. But it is a different control methodology that’s really the key.

New Technology for North American (10:22)

Doug Glenn: While this technology is somewhat new in North America, it is actually not new on a global context. Can you address this?

Christina Clowes: In Europe, this kind of zero-cross base system has been commonplace for quite some years; also in Asia. The difference in North America is, I think, tradition, more than anything else. People have been used to using phase angle control for silicon carbide heating elements. That’s kind of where this technology grew out from, and people have stuck with that because it works. But this new technology though gives an opportunity to save money and space, while achieving the same result.

Doug Glenn: So for the North American market, this is somewhat new. But it is a proven technology. It’s not a new technology that we are still trying to get our hands around. It’s been done globally, which is an important point.

Cost Savings for the Customer (11:45)

Doug Glenn: With respect to cost savings for the customer, can you describe the capital expenditures, operating costs, and even maintenance costs?

Steve Feldbauer: We know that by eliminating the transformer, there’s the substantial costings. The SCR is doing the change in the voltage and controlling and eliminating that need for the transformer.

By eliminating that piece of equipment, you’re seeing upwards of anywhere between a 50 to 75% cost savings per heating zone. That’s a big number. There’s a wide range in that cost savings depending on the size of the heating zone, the size of the furnace, and the number of heating zones. That is a substantial saving.

In addition, the customer sees savings in shipping costs. In this case, removing the transformer reduced the size of the furnace by 2,100 pounds. That goes directly into your shipping cost.

Customers also see a lot less downtime because every time that you would want to change the tap in a traditional furnace, you have to power the furnace down, which interrupts production. There’s a knowledge base needed to know when and how to change the tap. But with this new technology, the furnace just continually operates.

There is also space savings. That transformer takes up space, which limits where we can put in things. For example, for the last line on a continuous furnace with a belt, the placement of the belt is dictated by where we put the transformers because the transformers typically go up underneath the hot box. Without the transformer, we now have flexibility and design.

So, we save in a number of different areas.

Maintenance of the SCR (14:24)

Doug Glenn: Maintenance wise, are the SCRs easier to maintain?

Steve Feldbauer: There is not much maintenance required for the SCRs. Once you put them in and they are set up, our customers really do not have to touch them unless they have to replace them. As far as tuning them and similar maintenance, there’s really not a lot that goes into them. Especially since now, you’re also not changing voltages. There’s not a lot of variability in the system. It’s set up and it just sits there and controls itself.

Advantages for the Customer (17:45)

Doug Glenn: What are the advantages for the customer?

Steve Feldbauer: There are many advantages in terms of cost, maintenance, and the ease in usage. There’s also less training, because you’re not teaching someone when or how to change a tap. This is a marked change in how you look at electrical furnace control in North America. This is something that is widely used throughout the rest of the world, so it’s not a new technology, but it’s new and innovative to North America. If you can optimize and streamline the process, why wouldn’t you?

Upgraded Features: Digitization and Data (18:58)

Doug Glenn: I also understand there are upgraded features because you’ve moved to an SCR and into a digital world with being able to get data back out of the furnace and understand the operation of the system because of the digitalization of it. Do you want to address that?

Tony Busch: By having a digital SCR power controller, you can connect up to your network, whether it’s Ethernet IP or Modbus TCP. You are able to collect all of that data. From that data, you are able to do things such as monitor the KW per hour. If you’re starting your process, and you want to know how much power was consumed during that particular time period, you can reset your KW per hour. Then you can find out how much you consumed when you are done and evaluate your efficiencies. All of that is recorded within the power controller. It’s essentially an industrial grade power meter built in.

Also, now that you are directly coupled with the silicon carbide heating elements, you have a very accurate load resistance monitoring capability. You are able to analyze the resistance and determine the health of your silicon carbide heating elements.

You can also plot a resistance curve. So you would know that if tolerance drifts 10, 20, 30%, you may be looking at a predictive maintenance situation where you look at your heating elements at some point and monitor the load currents. For a three-phase setup, if you notice that one of the phases is unbalanced, you may want to evaluate and determine the cause. You are able to be alerted without manually getting in there with a multimeter and doing your own research.

Christina Clowes: Compared to phase angle firing, which has been historically the most commonly used in North America, switching to a zero-cross system, a full sine wave based system, the SCRs turn on and off at zero volts potential.

To learn more about how SCR power controllers support tighter control when directly coupled with heating elements, you can click the image above to read this in-depth technical article co-written by Tony Busch.

As a result, that doesn’t produce any transient spikes that create a harmonic overlay, so there’s no electrical noise being generated. Utility companies do penalize their customers for generating electrical noise on their supplies.

In addition, because you have false sine waves, you have unity power factor, essentially. There’s no poor apparent power factor, which you have with a phase angle firing because you’re chopping the sine wave and conducting only part of the sine wave.

When you have purely resistive load, in the case of a Star Bar element, there’s no reactance, inductance, or capacitance. But because of the way that a phase angle SCR fires, it appears that there’s a power factor and people pay for energy that they are not consuming. This is more efficient way of driving an element system with a better handle over the energy that you’re consuming.

Doug Glenn: Is it more difficult to engineer these systems?

Christina Clowes: The exciting or interesting part is introducing new technology to people that actually helps them and provides real benefits. The total cost of the system is simplified and reduced, which makes it far more attractive for Star Bar-based systems to be sold into applications.

Doug Glenn: Right, right. Okay. Tony, how about you? What was interesting and challenging?

Tony Busch: Sure, yes. Christina touched on it a little bit. It would be that power factor in harmonics — being able to show the ability and not be penalized from your utilities for power factor and potential harmonics. Those questions come up, you know, pretty much anytime you’re using an electric furnace and SCR power controllers, but it’s much more easy to demonstrate to customers that you’re not going to see any of those issues. And I’ve seen our electric bill. When you’re running phase angle, you get these big old penalties that come up on there. It’s nice to be to pass that savings onto the customers with this new application.

Doug Glenn: Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. And Steve, I saved you for last because you were the ones that really had to interface with the customer. What was interesting or challenging for you guys?

Steve Feldbauer: I’ll tell you what, it was exciting for us to be able to provide new technology — new to North America — that number one makes it simpler for the customer to use.

You know, one of the challenges is always trying to teach people, “when do I need to change a tap or is there really some other problem?” Well, this eliminates that. Now we’re helping them to be able to operate the furnace more efficiently. And, you know, they don’t require all of the training.

We’re also able to pass on some cost savings because we aren’t buying that transformer. We’re able to have some leeway internally for design and construction. So all the way around, it’s a win-win, right? For the customer, for us, and for the industry, in general. Because now we’re able to move the heating technology forward.

Sustainability Benefits of the SCR Power Controller (26:31)

Doug Glenn: Yeah. I probably should have asked this question before, but there’s always a lot of talk about sustainability and greenness. Are there advantages here on this system?

Steve Feldbauer: Tony, you want to talk about it? I’m sure you can address the harmonics and different things that actually help out.

Tony Busch: Most definitely. From a power controller standpoint, the efficiency is right around 99.9%; you’re not really getting any losses through the power controller. And now you’re talking about being full wave firing, so you’re not trimming back that sine wave, you’re eliminating all those other harmonics. You should see a benefit from all of your equipment, if they ever experience that as well as, and your utility bill, not seeing that power factor.

Doug Glenn: Yeah. So basically I guess that’s it. The simple answer is if you’re reducing your energy bill, then obviously we’re using less energy and that’s probably less of a carbon footprint depending on where your electricity’s coming from. Well guys, thanks very much. This is a very interesting, great partnership between the three companies, obviously for the benefit of customers. Appreciate you working for the benefit of a customer and for spending a little bit of time with us here today.

About the Guests

Tony Busch
North American Sales Manager
Control Concept

Tony Busch is Control Concept’s North American Sales Manager. Currently in his 15th year with Control Concepts, he has experience in assembly, testing, troubleshooting, field service and an expert understanding of application engineering of SCR power controllers. Tony has a bachelor’s degree in electrical construction from Dunwoody College of Technology which he now applies the electrical concepts to power controllers and their related applications.

For more information: Contact Tony at tony.busch@ccipower.com.

Christina Clowes
Corporate Vice President and Director
I Squared R Elements Co., Inc.

Christina Clowes is the Corporate Vice President and a Director of I Squared R Elements Co., Inc., located in Akron, NY. She has been at I Squared R for the past 9 years and a little over 40 years in the thermal processing industry, focusing on new product and application development.

For more information: Contact Christina at christina.clowes@isquaredrelement.com.

Dr. Stephen Feldbauer
Director of Research and Development
Abbott Furnace Company

Dr. Stephen Feldbauer received his Ph.D. in 1995 from Carnegie Mellon University in Materials Science and Engineering. He joined Abbott Furnace Company in 2002 where he is currently the Director of Research and Development. Dr. Feldbauer is also a Senior Adjunct Faculty member in Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of numerous articles, publications, and has been awarded eight patents in both the USA and Europe. He is an active member of the MPIF, the American Welding Society’s C3 Committee on Brazing, and a co-chair of the Markets committee of NAATBatt International.

For more information: Contact Stephen at sfeldbauer@abbottfurnace.com.

Heat Treat Radio #128: Silicon Carbide Without Transformers: How Is That Possible? Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #127: The Case for Modular Vacuum Heat Treating

/ HARDENING TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT TECH, QUENCHING TECHNICAL CONTENT, VACUUM FURNACES TECHNICAL CONTENT

In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, host Doug Glenn invites Dennis Beauchesne of ECM USA to explore the technology, benefits, scalability, and sustainability of modular heat treating systems. Together, they discuss how shared utilities, automated transfers, and adaptable heating cells can replace multiple standalone furnaces without compromising quality or precision. Learn how these systems streamline and simplify operations for future expansion — one cell at a time.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction

Doug Glenn: I am very privileged to have with me today, Dennis Beauchesne from ECM USA. We’re going to be talking about modular heat treating systems, which is a growing category of equipment.

ECM Synergy Center (00:50)

Doug Glenn: Tell me about ECM’s Synergy Center, which is where you are at right now, on the shop floor.

The ECM Flex 600TG vacuum furnace located in the ECM Synergy Center Source: ECM USA

Dennis Beauchesne: I’m standing here in the middle of our Synergy Center. It’s about a 5,000-square-foot facility that is dedicated to proving out client parts for testing various processes, mostly LPC, but we also do a number of other processes here. We have a full metallurgical lab, 3D microscope, a number of tools, including a CMM that we can do before and after heat treat distortion testing for clients that want to know how much their parts move.

It’s a dedicated center just for clients to use. We also use the center for pre-completion of installations, final testing, and training, such as training on maintenance, understanding the software, and how everything works together.

Doug Glenn: It’s proof of process plus much more — helping clients’ proof of process.

Dennis Beauchesne: Absolutely. That’s a big part of convincing people that this process is for them and that it works on their part. We can send them ten different reports of an exact same material and part, but they want to know what their part will do.

What is Modular Heat Treating? (02:50)

Doug Glenn: On a very basic, rudimentary level, what is modular heat treating and how does it differ from what might be considered standard or normal heat treating?

Dennis Beauchesne: A modular heat treat system is one that works together to have more than one furnace working in the same platform. You may have a shop that has five or six vacuum furnaces separated — they each have their own door, vacuum system, electrical supply, quench motors…those types of components. Or you may have a series of batch IQ furnaces for carburizing; those systems are one off, which means they are individual, independent systems.

In a modular system, you try to utilize those facilities for the use of multiple heating chambers. Instead of having one vacuum furnace with one set of pumps and one gas quench motor, what we would do is have three to eight heating cells that would be utilizing one quench, depending on the process timing; that’s all done with an internal transfer car and we try to utilize one vacuum system. It’s much smaller than what you would have for three, four, or even eight cells.

If you had oil or high pressure gas quenching, which is what’s dominating right now in the modular heat treat business, you could supply basically six batch IQ hot zones to one oil quench.

The savings then are huge simply by removing five or six other quench tanks in front of this system, as well as leveraging the floor space (and the number of pits you have to dig). Other advantages including utility savings and utilizing equipment across a number of heating chambers.

Doug Glenn: This modular approach is basically separate chambers that are dedicated to doing whatever that chamber is doing, and they are all in some way interconnected. For standard units, you would heat up, pre-process, do the actual process itself, cool down, all in the same chamber. In a modular unit, you move from chamber to chamber to do each of those separate steps.

Dennis Beauchesne: Yes, I refer to it as a continuous batch.

Doug Glenn: Continuous batch. We were talking before we actually hit the record button with your colleague there, Allison DeAngelo, who just got done visiting the Heat Treat Boot Camp. We were talking about different types of furnaces, and we started talking about continuous vacuum, which of course, is almost a misnomer — a vacuum can’t be continuous because you have to open it up and break the vacuum to get stuff out. Anyhow, we talked about it basically being a batch, right? A batch furnace that’s continuous, a continuous batch furnace.

Benefits of Modular Heat Treating (06:35)

Now that we have a basic understanding of what these modular systems are, why would companies want to move from the standard type of heat treating system to a modular system?

Dennis Beauchesne: Manpower. If you are running five or six vacuum furnaces, you are going to need a number of people to open the doors, put new loads in, those kinds of tasks. With a modular system, you only have one entry or one exit area. Therefore, you are only going to load once every 15-20 minutes, and the system is going to take over and control that load going through the system.

In addition, especially in a carburizing atmosphere situation, you can have every load be a different case depth — a different process in each cell — and then the next load that goes in that same cell can be totally different from the one before. For instance, if you had a batch IQ, you typically use the same carbon potential, and you are typically going to run the next load almost identical to the one before. In contrast, with the modular system, each cell can run a different process every load.

It’s also easier to integrate automation if you are doing capacity increases.

Throughput Comparison (08:00)

Doug Glenn: What is the comparison of throughput between a standard unit and a modular unit?

Dennis Beauchesne: The throughput comparison is interesting because you typically can use a little higher temperature for a carburizing and a little higher carbon potential, and of course that’s what we specialize in here with the modular systems. You can achieve about a 30-40% gain in your cycle time. That furnace is operating very close to 100% occupancy, because when that load is done, you are moving it out right into the gas quench. Then, the next load comes and goes right into it.

Doug Glenn: You are able to increase your throughput because you have basically 100% utilization of the equipment or very close to that. Comparatively, you don’t necessarily have that in the standard equipment.

Product Quality Comparison (09:15)

Doug Glenn: Do modular systems produce higher quality products?

Dennis Beauchesne: The quality of the parts coming out of the system is improved. A vacuum environment is a very clean environment, especially if we are considering atmosphere and low pressure carburizing — it’s in a vacuum. We typically do everything in high pressure gas quenching. However, even in oil quenching under vacuum, you are going to have a much cleaner part.

Also in low pressure carburizing, the carburizing is much more uniform throughout the part because we heat it to temperature under nitrogen before the part gets to austenitizing temperature to start attracting carbon. We make sure that the full part, that’s the tooth, the root, every piece of the part, is at temperature before we start adding carbon to the load, which makes a more uniform case depth, and therefore makes a stronger part.

Doug Glenn: Since each module, each chamber, is dedicated to doing what it is supposed to do, it seems like the consistency and the reliability of the parts being processed in a modular system have a much better chance of being higher quality.

Dennis Beauchesne: You do not have six different variable chambers or six different variable systems. You just have to look at monitoring the connection between those and understanding that the vacuum levels are all the same across the levels and across the cells. Each cell can meet a different temperature and run a different process, but those are consistent across the board.

Typical Dedicated Cells/Chambers (11:10)

Doug Glenn: What would be the typical dedicated cells/chambers of a modular system?

Dennis Beauchesne: It is dependent on the processes. They are most widely used for vacuum carburizing. For pre-oxidation and preheating, we usually use an air oven outside of the system, and we connect that with an external loader. Before the load goes into the modular system, the load will go through a regular air oven, be heated to around 700°F (400°C), and then the load will be moved in.

For sintering and those kinds of applications, there is a debind step or a preheat step that would be done in one cell. Some of the processes that can be done in a modular system include:

  • Low pressure carburizing
  • Low pressure carbon nitriding (LPC)
  • FNC (ferritic nitrocarburizing)
  • Nitriding
  • Debinding
  • Sintering
  • Neutral hardening

The most prominent process right now is LPC, and that is being used all over the world in these systems.

Advantages of a Modular Unit for Captive Heat Treaters (12:53)

Doug Glenn: Why would a modular unit be beneficial for a captive heat treater, someone who does their own in-house heat treating, which probably means they’ve got potentially high volume, low variability as far as their workloads?

Dennis Beauchesne: The modular unit has many different advantages. First of all, floor space. You are going to save a lot of floor space by not having multiple furnaces set up separately. You will also save utilities because you would not have as many vacuum pumps or electrical systems running these furnaces on their own. You will have some shared service and utilities in that fashion.

Doug Glenn: That would also likely lead to maintenance cost savings as well, correct?

Dennis Beauchesne: Yes, it all goes down the line. Anything that you have multiples of, you are going to have much less costs than on a joint system. The modular system might be a little larger than one singular unit, but there will be fewer of them.

For vacuum carburizing applications in a captive shop, the quality and cleanliness of the part is very, very important. Gas quenching lends itself to no oil in your plant, no washers necessary for a post-quench. Typically, there’s a washer before the process starts, but you do not have to have any wash to get the oil off of the parts with a modular unit — you do not have to reclaim the oil or the water from the washer. You would not have waste oil in your plant either or any oil on your plant floor. These are some of the reasons some of the larger captive shops have gone to the modular systems.

Also, safety: There are no open flames with a modular unit, no risks of fire on the systems. They are also easier to maintain. For a fully operational, let’s say, eight-cell system for high production, captive operation, it would only take about five hours to cool that whole system down if you had to go in and work on the whole system. In comparison, it’s going to take you three to four days sometimes to cool down a typical atmosphere, high-temperature furnace.

It also takes time to heat the system up again. In a modular system, it takes about an hour and a half to heat the system up again and then you are ready to start running. That means now you can schedule your downtime on weekends or holidays. You do not have to have staff present to run anything.

You also do not have to have a secondary equipment, like Endo generators running to feed the carburizing gas. The carburizing gas is using acetylene out of cylinders, it’s not a regenerative system. You do not need a separate piece of equipment to feed to the furnace.

Another benefit is CapEx expansion. Typically, captive heat treaters do not want to buy everything upfront because their volumes are going to increase over time. In the beginning, they typically only need one or two cells ready to do a small amount of production so they can prove out the production and prove out the system. Then they can start building the system with more cells and more capacity later on. Generally, it’s two to three days of downtime to add a cell to a system. It’s very convenient to do that with a modular system. All of the utilities are typically alongside the modular system so that you can easily add those or add a cell to it over a short period of time, and those cells can be ordered a year or two down the road whenever you might need that.

You also can order peripheral equipment, like extra temper ovens or additional automation. You can add a robotics system to the layout as well. That’s why captive shops are very interested.

Finally, workforce: It’s a little bit easier to get someone to work on a modular system. These systems are completely clean and white. The one located in our Synergy Center has been there for eight years. We use it every single day, and it’s a very clean aesthetic environment for someone to work in. These systems are also water cooled, which means not a lot of extra heat in the building around you to work in.

Advantages of a Modular Unit for Commercial Heat Treaters (17:59)

Doug Glenn: What are some advantages of modular units for commercial heat treating?

Dennis Beauchesne: On the commercial heat treat side, modular units are typically useful because you can get multiple processes out of similar cells and you can have a system that has oil and a gas quench.

You can have a lot of flexibility in that one system that you have in the plant. I’ve visited hundreds of captive and commercial heat treaters. They generally have a number of furnaces in one area of the plant, and a number of furnaces in another area of the plant. A modular system gives you all the capability in one machine and one tool: oil quenching, gas quenching, FNC, nitriding low pressure, carburizing, carbonitriding, and neutral hardening all in one piece of equipment.

Automation and Robotics with Modular Heat Treating (18:57)

Doug Glenn: What automation and robotics advantages are there with modular systems?

Dennis Beauchesne: This is the new trend. People that have modular systems are now considering, “How do I automate the system to get more production out of it?” And what we’ve been doing the last five years especially is implementing systems that use CFC fixtures.

CFC fixtures are very robust in the furnace but sensitive to being controlled outside. Therefore, what we try to do is have the CFC fixtures be utilized in an automation that no humans have to interact with it. We usually use robots for external loaders and internal loaders to move the fixtures through the process.

This causes you to have a lighter load, which means less heating time, less energy being consumed. Also, the fixtures last three to four times longer if they’re not damaged. But of course, all of these systems can be using regular alloy steel as well, and we can fixture different parts. You can use baskets, we are now doing bulk loading where we have parts that are filled into baskets and then processed. We are doing that with vacuum carbonizing as well, not just neutral hardening.

So it’s really interesting to see how the limits are being pushed, as well as the different materials that we are gas quenching now. I know 20-25 years ago, we were quenching some simple materials that were very high hardenability, and today we’re quenching a lot of less hardenability steels.

Doug Glenn: Is that primarily due to increase of pressure in the quench?

Dennis Beauchesne: It’s pressure, it’s flow, it’s the intensity of the gas going through the parts. It’s also heat removal as well — heat exchangers, removing the heat out of the load faster. We also have reversing gas quench motors to reverse the flow inside from top to bottom, bottom to top, in the middle of the cycle.

Sustainability of Modular Heat Treating (22:24)

Doug Glenn: Do these systems promote sustainability and greenness?

Dennis Beauchesne: Absolutely, especially when it comes to carburizing. These systems have been compared against typical atmosphere carburizing cycles, and only about 4% of the carburizing time has gas injection, when we are actually injecting acetylene and having hydrocarbons being used in the process.

If you took the same cycle times, seven or eight hours of a carburizing cycle, you are flowing Endo gas or nitrogen methanol in the system for that full time. In contrast in a vacuum carburizing system, it’s 4-5% of the time of the cycle that you’re injecting into the furnace. Ultimately, you only have about 10% of the CO2 output that you would have in a typical atmosphere furnace.

As mentioned previously, there’s also no oil in your plant. You’re not reclaiming oil out of the water and the wash or off the floor or in your car when you leave your heat treat shop.

How Does the Modular Heat Treating System Work? (23:40)

Doug Glenn: Let’s talk through the process a little bit. You provided us with figures to aid in describing the process. We have included these. Describe how the system works.

Dennis Beauchesne: This animation is a plan view of one of our Flex systems. In the center, going left to right, is a tunnel section. This tunnel section is about an 8-foot diameter. It has an automated loader that moves down left to right or horizontally, and it transfers loads from each cell to another, in and out.

On the bottom left is a loading/unloading chamber. In that loading/unloading chamber, we remove the air once the load is put in there, and then we balance the vacuum on that cell to the tunnel’s vacuum. Then we’re capable of moving that load to an available heating cell, and that would be on the right of the system — on the top right or the bottom right of the tunnel, those are heating cells. Then recipe for that particular load will be loaded into that cell. While that load is processing, another load will be moving into the tunnel and into the other heating cell as well.

On the top left is the gas quench cell, which could be in this orientation or instead have an exit on the back as well. In this system, you could do neutral hardening, carbon nitriding, LPC, a number of the processes. This is a very valuable tool, especially in a commercial heat treat heat treat shop.

Doug Glenn: Is this whole unit, including all four chambers under vacuum? I noted there are separation doors on the purge and the entry chamber. Can this area be vacuum sealed?

Dennis Beauchesne: Yes. There are vacuum seals on the loading/unloading chamber on the bottom left and then the top left. The gas quench also has a seal from a pressure standpoint. The two heating chambers have a graphite door — we call it the flap door, and it just flaps and it doesn’t really seal actually against another face of graphite. It’s graphite-to-graphite. We pull vacuum out of there through the tunnel to create the central vacuum pressure in the system. We also pull vacuum from the cell itself, and we could also have a separate door on the front of the unit if the process necessitates that or if we feel that a door is needed there by a client.

In a normal state or a standard unit, there are no hot seals on the door, only vacuum seals on the loading/unloading chamber and the gas quench.

Doug Glenn: In the animation, your vacuum pumps are down in the bottom right, correct?

Dennis Beauchesne: Exactly, that’s a process pump.

Doug Glenn: What is located in the top left?

Dennis Beauchesne: On the top left, we have a gas quench tank. We want to ensure we have enough gas pressure and volume there to quench the load quickly. It’s very important to get the gas through the gas quench quickly.

ECM Flex 600TG vacuum furnace with two added heating cells / Source: ECM USA

Now, we have added two more additional heating cells and a central tunnel section. In essence, you just doubled the space, doubled the capacity of the unit, where you only added 50% of the space of what you had for capacity before.

We are still utilizing the same gas quench and the same loading/unloading cell. We only added utilities for the two heating cells, not for a whole gas quench or oil quench capability there; this can be added in a very short time.

Doug Glenn: Now I’m gonna go let this video roll here for a minute. There we go.

ECM Flex 600TG vacuum furnace with four added heating cells for six heating  cells total

Dennis Beauchesne: So now we added another 50% capacity with two more heating cells (six heating cells total) and a tunnel section. Typically, what you want to do is to have the tunnel sized for about five years out for your capacity and then buy the cells as you need them and have it grow so then the tunnel is ready to implement.

We have just tripled the capacity of this installation, and we are only still using the same gas quench and the same loading/unloading cell. Generally, this system could go to eight cells and have just one gas quench, that’s our typical orientation.

Doug Glenn: It looks like we also added a discharge side here. Whereas before we were going in and out.

Dennis Beauchesne: Yes, this adds to the efficiency of the system because the load is already in the gas quench when it’s finishing, so it just exits out the back, out the door.

Doug Glenn: Now what do we have here?

ECM Flex 600TG vacuum furnace processing different treatments in each cell. See animation above to watch the animation in motion.

Dennis Beauchesne: We have the loads entering, and the loads will go to the first cell that is available (empty). Then that recipe would be downloaded for that cell, and then the next load will go to the next available heating cell and download that recipe into that cell. These could be two different loads.

One load could be for neutral hardening; one could be for carburizing. One could be for carburizing in a low case depth. The other one could be carburizing at a deeper case. In this case, we just see the gas quench on here, but this tunnel could also be outfitted with an oil quench as well, and you could have one load go into gas, quench one load, go into oil quench or both going to either.

Doug Glenn: This gives people a sense of what the process looks like.

Processes and Materials for the Modular System (30:29)

Doug Glenn: Are there any processes or materials that do not make sense to process them through one of these systems?

Dennis Beauchesne: If you are doing a lot of annealing and normalizing, those are longer cycles. There is some regulated cooling that occurs. This is not really the type of equipment investment that you would want to make for those processes. If you were going to use it for a few loads in your plant where you received parts that weren’t annealed or you wanted to try to anneal a part for a particular process before you went to full production, you could certainly use a modular system for that, but it’s not a cost effective methodology. Neither would we recommend preheating in the cell. However, it is very flexible for a number of other processes that we have mentioned.

The size of the part is also important to note. These systems are typically 24 inches wide and about 39 inches long and about 28 inches high. However, we will soon have a new system, the Flex Max, a 12-9-9 system. It’s a 36×48 unit that comes with an oil quench and is modular, like this. We can either do an oil quench or a slow cool cell on that system. So, we will have that capability of 36×48 in that modular system.

Other than that, restrictions on material? Very few there. Like I said, you would not want to do annealing and normalizing on a lot of parts, but you could do it in these units.

Doug Glenn: It sounds like the sweet spot is surface modification type applications, and some sintering is possible with dedicated chambers.

Dennis Beauchesne: Yes, sintering and brazing is also possible.

Doug Glenn: Does that include aluminum brazing?

Dennis Beauchesne: Not aluminum brazing, but some brazing applications.

Expenses with Modular Heat Treating Systems (33:03)

Doug Glenn: What would be considered capital expenses for this modular system?

Dennis Beauchesne: As far as capital expenses, it’s not a furnace-to-furnace comparison. Clients always ask how much our furnace is. But companies need to first take two steps back and take a look at their incoming material, how they would like to be able to modify that incoming material in their heat treat process to make sure that their outgoing quality is higher than it is today. That’s the kind of benefit that this type of modular system gives you — a better quality part, safety in your plant, and a better quality work environment with being able to turn the system off and not need additional personnel around.

These are all factors that have to be considered when thinking about the CapEx expenditure and investment. When we consider these factors, a modular system investment is a much better situation than looking at a furnace-to-furnace replacement, and that’s really the thought process that clients need to go through to understand the actual investment and value of the system.

Doug Glenn: What about the operational expenses?

Dennis Beauchesne: For instances, if you had a batch IQ sitting there, you would typically keep it running whether it has a load in it or not. With a modular system, you just shut off that cell that you’re not using. It does not take any more energy. If you are not working five days a week, you do not use it on the weekends — you shut it off. You do not use it during Christmas shutdown or any holiday shutdown, vacation shutdown. You’re able to shut it off and that means saving a lot of energy and labor by having it off.

Also, in the opposite way, you could run it lights out if you wanted, as well. You could stock up a number of loads on the automation before you leave, have the system operate it, run it, and have the load come back out before the morning. You could have it time start as well, if you wanted to start it on Monday at 5 AM, but you will not be there till 8 AM. You would come in and the furnace would be hot and ready to run a process.

There are a number of operational advances over the typical operational heat treat that’s out there today.

Doug Glenn: How does maintenance work with these systems? Say your heating element goes bad in cell number three, do I have to shut the whole system down to fix or can I fix number three and leave the rest of the system up and running?

Dennis Beauchesne: In this situation if you had a tunnel like we showed, you would typically shut off that cell; that is, if you knew that heating element was out or it wasn’t heating properly, you could shut off that cell, de-validate is what we call it, and then keep running the rest of the system until you had a window in your production that you could shut the whole system to get into that heating element.

If you had a system with doors on the front, it could be possible to go in the back while the system is operating. Then, it would be all based on your safety requirements for your plant and those kinds of things.

To do that, we have another system called the Jumbo, and it is much more flexible in the maintenance world. It has a vacuum car that moves down on rails and docks and mates with every heating cell on the system. In that line, the heating cell can actually be isolated from the rest of the line. You would just slide it back (It’s on wheels, it slides back about three feet away from the line), you put in a new piece of safety fence, and you continue to run your line. You can completely lock out/tag out that cell and work on it completely.

Doug Glenn: How would you approach a vacuum leak since the whole system is connected, right? I believe you mentioned these are graphite-on-graphite doors.

Dennis Beauchesne: You would want to fix the leak before you move on. Especially if it’s a bad leak. If it’s something that’s causing you to not maintain your process pressure, you certainly don’t want to do that, and that’s true with every vacuum piece of equipment.

ECM Modular Systems (38:55)

Doug Glenn: How many of these modular type systems does ECM have out in the marketplace?

Dennis Beauchesne: The Flex is the most popular modular system, which we discussed with the animation. We also have a number of Jumbos systems, and the unit in our Synergy Center is called a Nano, which has become more and more popular these days. The Nano has three different size chambers, but they’re typically smaller, 20x24x10 inch high size chamber. I explained a little bit about the Flex and the Jumbo is the same.

Out of those three systems, we have more than 350 modular systems, not just the heating cells, but more than 350 systems that are out in the marketplace today operating, running parts every day, running millions and millions of parts every week. Those systems are comprised of about 2,000 heating cells. As much as people hear about this being a new technology, it has actually been around about 30 years, and many companies have been using these systems and have replaced a number of pusher furnaces and those style furnaces for high-capacity installations especially.

Doug Glenn: Okay, that sounds good. I really appreciate your time.

About the Guest

Dennis Beauchesne
General Manager
ECM USA

Dennis Beauchesne joined ECM over 25 years ago and has since amassed extensive vacuum furnace technology experience with over 200 vacuum carburizing cells installed on high pressure gas quenching and oil quenching installations. Within the last 10 years, his expertise has expanded to include robotics and advanced automation with the heat treat industry high-demand for complete furnace system solutions. As General Manager of ECM USA, Dennis oversees customer supply, operations and metallurgical support for Canada, U.S., and Mexico for ECM Technologies. He has worked in the thermal transfer equipment supply industry for over 30 years.

For more information: Contact Dennis at DennisBeauchesne@ECM-USA.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #127: The Case for Modular Vacuum Heat Treating Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #126:  HIP Finds New Life in Modern Manufacturing

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO, HIPING TECHNICAL CONTENT

Hot isostatic pressing, or HIP, is experiencing a powerful resurgence across industries from aerospace to nuclear energy as manufacturers look for new ways to scale up. This panel of HIP experts explores how renewed investment, government collaboration, and additive manufacturing are driving HIP’s next era of growth. From large-scale production to powder-to-part innovations, discover why this decades-old process is suddenly critical to the future of U.S. manufacturing. 

In this episode, Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, is joined by Cliff Orcutt, American Isostatic Presses, Inc; Oscar Martinez, Bodycote; Victor Samarov, Synertech PM; Soumya Nag, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Mike Conaway, Isostatic Forging International; and Dave Gandy, EPRI.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:05) 

Doug Glenn: Welcome everyone to another episode of Heat Treat Radio. We have gathered a panel of experts to discuss hot isostatic pressing (HIP). I’ve asked the panel to bring us up to date on the latest developments and trends in the HIP market.  

I want to jump into the questions here quickly so we can move through and let these experts do the talking. But I want these six gentlemen to very briefly introduce themselves.

Cliff, go ahead with your background, please.

Cliff Orcutt: Yes, I’m the vice president of the American Isostatic Presses. I’m also chairman of the International HIP Committee. I’ve been in isostatic pressing over forty-five years. I started building equipment and then began installing it. Now I’m mainly selling it. Our company is a small company which has supplied equipment to forty countries around the world.

Doug Glenn: Okay, very good. Victor, how about you?

Victor Samarov: I work for Synertech PM Technologies. My background goes back to the Soviet Union in Russia where I got my education and started to get involved in powder metal technology and HIP. I’ve been a part of pioneering the sophisticated and challenging tasks of building jet and rocket engines from powder materials and, since 2000, working in the United States in near net shape and net shape HIPing of parts and materials for critical applications.

Doug Glenn: Alright, thank you. That’s great. All right, Soumya, how about you?

Soumya Nag: Thanks, Doug, for having me. And good afternoon everybody. My name is Soumya Nag. I am a material scientist and metallurgist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I work on different types of materials and manufacturing processes to get large scale components.

The reason why I’m here is that I’m leading a big effort under the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy’s a AMMT program — advanced materials and manufacturing technology program. This program actually looks at power metal HIP technology to make large scale components.

Doug Glenn: Super. And we’re going to talk about large scale things in a little bit here. Mike, how about you?

Mike Conaway: I’m the managing director of Isostatic Forging International, and we own operate and technically support about fifteen HIPs around the world.

I’ve had a lifetime involvement with HIP equipment design, construction operation maintenance. I started at Battelle when I was nineteen years old, I think. Cliff has got me beat on the youth point and maybe on a few other points too. Except for six years as a Navy pilot, I’ve done nothing else except HIP my entire life.

Our current development efforts are very large HIPs and very small HIPs at the lab scale tailored for additive manufacturing.

Doug Glenn: Appreciate your service, by the way, in the Navy. That’s great.

Mike Conaway: Well, it was great fun. Great to look back on.

Doug Glenn: Super. David, how about you?

David Gandy: Yeah, I’m a principal technical executive in EPRI’s nuclear materials areas. Doug indicated my background in metallurgy and welding for, I guess, the last fifteen years or so. I’ve spent time in advanced manufacturing looking at a variety of different topics, including PM and HIP. I have been in the business for a little more than forty years.

We’re all getting a little gray.

Doug Glenn: All well experienced, well-seasoned. All right, Oscar.

Oscar Martinez: Oscar Martinez. I’m the youngest of the group and learning from everybody here. I’m the regional sales manager for HIP North America, so I cover six different facilities in the North American market. I’m a metallurgical engineer by background. I have been in the oil and gas industry for about eight years with fader analysis and then jumped into HIP and product fabrication. Happy to be here; thanks for the invite.

Doug Glenn: Appreciate you joining us.

A New Renaissance of HIP? (7:41) 

The first question really deals with what has been bringing interest back to back to HIP. It seems like a lot of what we’re hearing about HIP processing deals with 3D printing and additive manufacturing. 

Is that the primary driver of the new renaissance of HIP? 

Victor Samarov: No, I wouldn’t say so. Basically, there are three areas of “HIPing.” The first has been rising steadily through decades, and that is HIPing of castings. You take a bad casting and bring it to the level of a better material by healing porosity cracks and changing the microstructure. 

The second area, which you mentioned, is 3D printing, which is, to some extent similar. HIPing of 3D-printed parts is similar to HIPing of castings, but there is more emphasis not on healing porosity but on changing the microstructure and making it more uniform and homogeneous. However, the parts are much smaller by far, and the share of the market is not large. Bodycote and others probably have a better understanding of this.

The third area is making parts from powders, which has been steadily at a relatively low level. This is because the only major industries interested in this have been aerospace, rocket engines, and oil and gas, all of which are  well developed in Europe and Sweden. For example, there’s a company that has been doing very large parts for that for decades. 

Recently, I mean the last fifteen years, we have to thank not only the Department of Energy (DOE) but David Gandy who was an enthusiast and a pioneer pushing this technology forward. There is much more interest from the nuclear industry in replacing very heavy forgings, which take years to fabricate and still usually are not good quality, by powdered metals.  

This leads to open doors in many other aspects because most of the nuclear parts are large, and many of them are larger than the existing HIP furnaces. So large that it requires 4 meter, 3 meter, 5 meter, etc. — we can discuss. So, the new driver to PM HIP is mainly from the nuclear industry with large parts since they bring a lot of technical problems, serious problems.  

This is very important, and this is the major perspective for HIP: rockets engines will still be there, aerospace will still be there, but nuclear is a new horizon.  

Doug Glenn: David, what’s driving the new renaissance from your perspective? It seems that there is somewhat of a renaissance of HIPing, more activity. The nuclear market, will you address that?  

David Gandy: Certainly  the nuclear area. We are looking to build quite a number of reactors over the next 30 years. In fact, we’re discussing 600 to 800 gigawatts of new build, which is quite enormous compared to what we have today. 

Much of this activity is being driven by things like data centers. There’s a lot of construction of data centers planned over the next ten years even, but certainly it will continue to grow. There’s a lot of additional power that is needed for things like electric vehicles. There’s a bit of work going on around that. 

In general, as we modernize our world, electricity certainly becomes more in demand, and we have to meet those demands. The other part of this is just looking at carbon issues and trying to reduce the overall carbon footprint in the world. Nuclear electric power provides a very clean generating product that can be used throughout the world. 

Doug Glenn: Larger parts seem to be a driver in HIP as well.  

The issue with getting larger HIP parts is actually building the equipment to carry out HIPing because, as the equipment gets larger in diameter, for example, the complexity and the engineering of it becomes extremely difficult. Soumya, can you address this aspect?  

Soumya Nag: There are very different aspects to what we are referring to when we say large parts. As you mentioned, in terms of whether you can HIP large parts, that is obviously a drawback. The other is, as you go into more complex parts or one-of-a-kind parts, can you make it cost effective and can you make it perform as well as your cast-forged counterparts? 

That’s a big question. We have a sizable team at Oakridge working on looking at U.S. domestic manufacturing resilience. Can we actually make customized parts by different manufacturing modalities and use different materials that could fit to that manufacturing scheme to produce components that are built to perform the way you want them to?  

PM HIP forms a big part of that portfolio. Using additive manufacturing along with PM HIP, which we call convergent manufacturing because we are converging two different manufacturing modalities using similar or even disciplined materials, is something that we are extremely focused on. 

Now what is advantage of additive manufacturing? The big advantage to additive manufacturing is design flexibility and customization of the parts, which helps your end product. Like Victor mentioned, all aspects of PM HIP are still good in terms of the densification, powder consolidations, and other factors, that are still as you would expect it to form. 

You are basically coupling a kind of technology: first, a newer process in the case of additive manufacturing with, second, one which has greater flexibility, that is PM HIP, a relatively well known technology.  

Click below for HIP technical articles

Doug Glenn: Let’s talk to the guys who are out there selling this process and/or building the equipment. First, Oscar, what are you seeing? What are the toll processing changes?

Oscar Martinez: The majority of what toll HIP service is going to see is castings by a magnitude of 60 or 80% of the business as a whole as of now. I have seen a lot more over the last couple of years on 3D printing and additive manufacturing.  

I do want to say that additive manufacturing has been growing in different markets as well. In the medical market, it is a little bit more established. We have seen the medical market take on some of the porous coating and those new technologies that help.  Within the aerospace market, I think it’s getting closer and closer to being more of a critical component. 

There is still a gap between those two industries. However, the business is starting to grow. For companies that are doing this, I’m noticing they are increasingly starting to get involved in having additive manufacturing either in-house with their own machines or through a sub-contractor. I do agree that in the near future castings are always going to be predominantly the factor. 

The last aspect is there has to be a cost analysis. Your absolutely right on this, Victor. I’m seeing it on the additive manufacturing side; they want to implement rapid cooling and they want to implement different cycles and different properties to get various properties from the material itself. However, there’s a difference whenever we’re talking about toll HIP service. If they want to do those, then those fall into dedicated cycles, which are much more expensive.

So, there has to be a kind of in between where we consolidate features and processes, because price is going to be the leader in terms of how fast it grows in the market. 

Doug Glenn: Mike, what are you seeing in your organizations?  

Mike Conaway: We’ve run about 250,000 HIP cycles, and 95% of those are castings. 

To lay the foundation of what we consider a small or large part: to me a small part is something that’s less than 8 inches in diameter, a medium-sized part is maybe 2 feet, and current large parts are about 5 to 6 feet in diameter, though we are now  trying to make parts that may be as large as 12 or 15 feet in diameter. 

We have to have some idea of what scale we’re talking about of these parts. That being said, we are essentially all castings, with very little powder metal.  

Doug Glenn: Cliff, any drivers that you’re seeing for HIP?  

Cliff Orcutt: The main driver is that as the world keeps advancing and as we have higher technologies and computers with FEA and so forth, we’re looking for stronger, lighter, faster materials.  

The performance of materials in general is increasing throughout every industry, whether that’s a car or an airplane or a printer. Also, the technology is spreading worldwide faster because communication and the internet. I believe the United States used to have the lock on HIP, and now China and Russia and other places are all on par with us. It’s spreading throughout the whole world, and it snowballs too. 

Initially, it was slow, but now it’s snowballing faster and faster. 3D printing is an exciting technology that has brought about new applications, but I think even other applications are just growing faster and spreading.   

The Origin of HIP (20:12)

Doug Glenn: Is the origin of the HIPing process U.S.-based?  

Mike Conaway: It’s like asking, “who had the first airplane?” Everybody agrees it was the Wright Brothers.  Similarly, it’s agreed that HIP was invented at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. I came to Battelle a few years after it was invented, and I was in on the industrialization of the process. Obviously, some serious work has been done in Russia and China, but that’s where it came from. That’s where Cliff’s father and I worked together — at Battelle — and we consider ourselves “Fathers of the Industrialization of the HIP Process.” 

Doug Glenn: You’re not going to take credit for creating it, though, for the internet?  

Mike Conaway: No, no, that was Edwin Hodge, Stan Paprocki, and Henry Saller.  

Doug Glenn: Well, your humility is showing through here, Mike.   

HIP Worldwide (21:37) 

Doug Glenn: Let’s address how the technology is spreading across the world. 

Are there any major new players either on the manufacturing of equipment side or the use of the equipment side around the world?  

Cliff Orcutt: There are both players, manufacturing, and end users. As far as manufacturers, we’re now seeing there are five Chinese domestic manufacturers. There are new ones in Russia, Korea, and India. There’s also a major player in Spain; that’s Hyperbaric. They have been building high pressure equipment, but not necessarily HIP. We see companies like that opening up and starting to build. We don’t know which ones will survive, because HIP is an up and down market. We’ve seen some companies come and go — vacuum generators, and on and on. We will see how it will all play out.  

We have seen new manufacturers, as far as users or toll producers. There are large companies in China now starting up. Korea has some, India is probably the next big market, maybe ten years behind. 

Victor Samarov: I want Cliff to add more, because Cliff has wonderful stories. We’re talking mainly about metals, but Cliff is a great proponent of ceramics, and ceramics not only has great applications but requires different HIP equipment for high temperature and for high pressures. Ceramics is also the future.  

Cliff Orcutt: Yes, we do see a lot of ceramics. Everything from braces and teeth to ball bearings for electric motors, boron carbide armor, military applications, hafnium carbide, and odium carbide. Those things are coming. 

One of the hindrances to HIP is the cost of raw materials. People tell us, if you could make silicon nitride powder cheaper, we’d HIP everything out of silicon nitride.  

Soumya Nag: One thing I wanted to add is we talked about HIPing cast metal parts and several materials: HIPing is also used to densify or “heal” additive parts as well. You can look at an AM part, and we usually go through a HIPing process to kind of heal what we call the lack of fusion type of porosities, or even in some cases the gas porosities work as well if your operating temperature is not too high where the gas can come out again. HIP is being used for a lot of use cases for castings. You can actually HIP using powder for alloys that cannot be forged. So that’s another specialized use case for HIPing as well. 

Interactions with the DOD and DOE (25:16) 

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump into discussing how the DOD and the DOE are pressing hard on the industry to come up with a 4-meter HIP unit. 

David, can you tell us what the driving force is here, what we’re trying to accomplish, and why it’s a challenge?  

David Gandy: So much of this started back around 2017 when we started a DOE project. In that DOE project, we were looking at utilizing the new scale reactor design to try to produce components out of powder metallurgy HIP. We worked with Syntech quite a bit in that area, trying to build large components like the reactor head and other parts throughout. Those, ultimately, would go to about 10 feet in diameter. We are currently restricted right now by the size of the HIP units that we’ve been working on, so we’re only making things on the order of 60 or 70 inches. 

The real driver there comes out of our success in producing very large components that are near net shape — we would like to be able to expand that to be able to do very large parts. The 4 meter came from a little bit of the work around the projects with the Department of Energy (DOE). It also came from DOD, which was beginning to look at whether we can actually make big parts for nuclear reactors that sit on a submarine, an aircraft carrier, or another boat. 

How do we actually make some of those large parts? There is quite an interest from the DOD and from the DOE in trying to really push the technology. We kind of settled in that 4 meter range; it might be a little bigger, it might be a little smaller, but to make some of the large parts that we’re talking about, we need to have a much larger HIP unit than is available today. 

Doug Glenn: Are the larger parts for a nuclear reactor specifically or are we talking about a variety of different large parts? 

David Gandy: Parts of them are for the nuclear reactor, but there are a number of other components, like large valves or large pump housings — many different components that could be produced with this technology. 

Doug Glenn: What are the main impediments to a 4 meter HIP unit?  

Cliff Orcutt: Like anything that’s new, there are unknowns, and the big one is the ROI along with the cost of doing something on that scale. Many of us are looking at it; companies such as Bodycote are considering larger units and MTC is considering larger units. The U.S. government at one time had the largest HIP in the world. Now it’s owned by Japan. We are hoping the U.S. government will step up and try to do a large project again. 

“There’s unknowns and the big one is the ROI and the cost of doing something on that scale.”

We went to the moon and we did other things, but we’ve kind of pulled back. We hardly have large forging capability in the U.S. anymore, and we need to invest in these kinds of technologies and push this forward.  

David Gandy: I’d like to build just a little bit on what Cliff said. In terms of building reactors in the U.S. to support the civil fleet — the civil nuclear reactors — quite frankly, we don’t have the forging capacity in the U.S. that we once had to do that. 

So this would actually supplement the forging capabilities and allow us to reshore some of those capabilities in the U.S.  

Oscar Martinez: That is a good point, David, and it is part of where PM HIP will jump in and bridge the gap between the two. 

One thing I wanted to mention regarding what Cliff said about the ROI is that the biggest factor for HIP companies — like Bodycote and others out there — is making sure that we have the nuclear side. We have already seen what the ramp up is going to look like and everything. 

For us, if a HIP unit is not running, it’s not making money. So, we need to make sure that HIP unit is always running, and that it’s going to pay for itself. With these large units, the price of it doesn’t just double from previous one, it exponentially goes up.  

Victor Samarov: Double? It’s quadruple! 

Oscar Martinez: I know the DOD and DOE are working closer together to have more synergy in terms of what components they need to process. But I also think that in the industrial side of things, like general industrial, anything with heavy equipment, any of those components that probably were not something liable to use of HIP because of the size or price, it would be good to start looking at how we can incorporate those other markets to see if they would also use some of that equipment or those HIP services for their equipment.  

David Gandy: On the DOD side of the house, we have something called AUS, which is the agreement between Australia, the U.S., and the UK, wherein we’re actually going to be building quite a number of ships and submarines over the next few decades. That’s going to change the way we look at our supply chain. In trying to build these components, we need to have additional forging, casting, additive manufacturing, and HIP capabilities — we need to have it all. It cannot happen without a number of different technologies engaged.   

The Path to Commercial (34:00)

Doug Glenn: In discussing these additional needs and supply chain logistics, Victor mentioned that the commercial viability of the 4 meter is difficult. Victor, could you expand? 

Victor Samarov: If ATLAS HIP appears tomorrow, we’re ready to make parts with it. There is powder supply and we know how to make the casts. With some small underwater stones, we can make the parts, but we’ve been waiting for this HIP system for at least ten years.   

“If ATLAS HIP appears tomorrow, we’re ready to make parts with it.” -Victor Samarov

There is no commercial company to build it, and there is no commercial company to order it unless it’s the U.S., Chinese, or Korean government. The technological idea is based on very advanced developments done by EPRI and other scientists in joining already manufactured power parts. 

We did try it already. We made very large parts that were cut in half and then joined by electron beam welding. It may be this faster route to provide U.S. industry with very large parts: first make parts as large as they can be and then electron-beam weld them. 

Working with David Gandy’s new scale projects, one part was so large that we had to split it into six segments. So, we made the segments and then they were successfully electron-beam welded. Practically, we were keeping all the advantages of powder metallurgy and HIP: lead time, material quality, faster development, so on and so forth. So, this may be a very viable direction.  

Doug Glenn: Mike, is that the path to commercial viability? 

Mike Conaway: I’m not quite sure. I call it jumbo additive manufacturing where you make these parts that have to be cut apart in, in concept, and then put together physically — that’s the additive manufacturing of jumbo parts. I think it’s a great idea.  

We are looking at the same sort of idea. To make a very large HIP, we would make it as a composite of segmented pieces that fit together. We call it the Lego HIP. That’s an approach, and we’re still working on that.  

Oscar Martinez: To add to something Cliff mentioned about going in between. We’ve talked about ATLAS, and I think Victor mentioned it too. 

From a commercial standpoint, I think it would be beneficial for us to venture into a kind of in-between size that does give us capabilities and proves out what we have to do. That would be probably a step in the right direction of where we need to be, because it will cover a lot of the components that we are not able to see. 

The oil and gas industry also has some components, and even on the IGT and aerospace side, if we go in between on some of those things, they will then design based on that size. If we’re looking at just commercially what HIP unit makes most sense for us to run, toll HIP services is always going to be between the 30 to 45-inch zone because it is able to fill in quickly. 

But again, that’s the biggest challenge. If we to go to an in-between larger component, what else could we bring in there that we could run all the time and make commercially viable for whoever jumps in — whether it be Bodycote, anybody else, or a collaboration — that it actually makes sense to be used.  

Cliff Orcutt: From an economic standpoint, if you’re only building one 4 meter HIP and you have to decide whether it goes to the East Coast or West Coast — that’s a tough decision. But if you build a couple 2 meter HIPs, you could afford to put one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, and you solve not only the submarine building on the East Coast, but you might solve some of the SMR building on the West Coast.  

Doug Glenn: Or you put a 4 meter HIP in St. Louis and that takes care of it all.  

Cliff Orcutt: If you can get it there.  

Doug Glenn: Yes, if you can get it there, correct.    

Powder to Part (37:05)

Doug Glenn: Let’s talk about powder to part. What is it, what current processes might it replace, and what are the obstacles to using it?

Soumya Nag: At Oakridge, we are testing whether you can actually make custom powders, scale up that powder production, and then utilize PM and AM, or different type of modalities, to make large-scale parts or customized parts. With powder to part, you have a powder and you have a certain chemistry specification for that powder. Can we actually find out whether we are going to have a PM HIP as a plausible way to make the part out of it? Make a mold, fill it up, and predict how the part will behave in the post-HIP, the machine changes, etc., and then inspect the properties.  

One more caveat: When we talk about powder, where is the powder coming from?  

We have to look at the feed stock that has been used to make the powder and ask: What is the chemistry of the powder? What is the shape of the powder? What’s the flowability of the powder? The physical and chemical properties of the powder itself?

Doug Glenn: Dave, what appears to be the most promising avenue to bring this about? 

David Gandy: Well, I think one of the things that you’ve really got to consider for powders is powder cleanliness. 

We’ve worked quite a number of years on trying to reduce things like oxygen in the powder so that as you consolidate that component, you don’t end up with oxides that are trapped at the grain boundaries or prior particle boundaries. It’s very important that we get powder manufacturers to work with us to bring the technology forward. 

Understanding the molecular chain of powder: reducing oxides
“Reduce things like oxygen in the powder so that as you consolidate that component, you don’t end up with oxides that are trapped at the grain boundaries or prior particle boundaries.”

In addition to that, if we start making very large parts in a 4-meter HIP unit, we’re going to have to really scale up our powder production capabilities in the U.S., and quite frankly, that’s not happened at this point.

Doug Glenn: They’re not going to want to upgrade their powder manufacturing if there’s not a market for it.  

Victor Samarov: Yes, exactly. One really large part may need a hundred thousand pounds of powder in it. We have already completed these calculations. I completely agree with David.  

One more piece I want to add: From powder to part, all the processes, except HIPing and maybe ceramic, are based on melting the material and then giving it some shape. Cast and rot investment casting, even additive manufacturing, is based on melting every particle. However, when powder metallurgy started in the ‘80s in the U.S. aerospace industry, the basic advantage it was looking at was the quality of the powder particles themselves. As you know, as heat treaters, the maximum cooling rates in cooling the billet are some hundreds of degrees per minute. But the powder particle crystallizes, and it crystallizes at the rate of 10,000 degrees per second because of its very tiny size. So, it can freeze almost any type of unbalanced metastable microstructure in it. 

HIPing is a solid-state bonding process. Nothing is melting in HIP. This means that during this process, we can retain this unique microstructure of the powder particles and then create and transfer this to parts of any size. For steel alloys, it may not be so critical, but for nickel base and some other alloys it’s absolutely essential. 

The caveat here is that going from powder to part via HIPing, you can create very large parts with unique properties brought by the rapid solidified powder particle materials.    

Doug Glenn: Mike, anything you’d like to add on the powder to part?  

Mike Conaway: No, I don’t have anything to offer much there. 

We’re intrigued with the additive manufacturing. Our focus has been on the binder jet that’s based on sintering where I think it offers a lot more advantages than it does to the laser fusion approach. 

Oscar Martinez: From our end, we’ve been doing this for a while already in Sweden with the oil and gas industry being a major, almost an established, process. However, one thing that I did want to bring up is not only is there a challenge with the current powder suppliers in the U.S. — there is some movement in terms of bringing new suppliers —but whenever we’re discussing some of these components being so critical, where the powder is coming from is going to also be critical. As David mentioned, just as much as the HIP needs to be ramped up and that large unit needs to be built, just as quickly we need to do the same thing with the powder suppliers as well. If we need to keep it in-house, the U.S. is going to have to grow very quickly as well. 

Doug Glenn: Much of what was discussed at Oak Ridge recently by the DOD and DOE was about bringing home the supply chain, including powder production.   

Cliff Orcutt: The technology of making parts concerns how to model those parts and how to predict shrinkage. 

There’s people that understand it but making it more accessible to companies is key to expanding the market for it. 

David Gandy: We are currently working with Oak Ridge National Labs and a few others to look at bringing modeling to your laptop, basically to allow you to do modeling for the HIP process, very similar to what maybe you do with forging technologies today, where you can have that capability to design as a conventional engineer.  What we’re trying to accomplish in working on this project is really looking at how we make modeling more mainstream for industry. As you make the modeling portion of this more mainstream, then the HIPing technology becomes more mainstream. The more people are exposed to it, the more people are engaged in it, the more companies want to work with it. I’d also like to thank Victor Samarov because Victor has certainly been a huge proponent of this and of trying to help move the technology forward.

Oak Ridge National Lab (48:07)

Doug Glenn: Soumya, I understand Oak Ridge National Laboratory has taken an active role in the PM HIP market. What exactly are you guys doing there what are you hoping to accomplish?  

Soumya Nag: We want to make components that are relevant towards nuclear in the DOE space as well as national security in the DOD space. That’s where the drivers are.  

The first thing I want to mention is that we don’t want to replace your traditional manufacturing, casting, or forging by any means. As Dave was mentioning, the need for production is going to ramp up so high within the U.S. that we will need alternative manufacturing pathways to really augment some of the troubles we have on supply chain side.  

PM HIP is one of the technologies that we have chosen. Under PM HIP, we have done three things. First, can we actually use an AM, what we call a directed energy deposition process or WAM, our AM process, where we are basically making these five mile long wells that are used as a shell for the outside surface. Can that withstand the temperatures, pressures, and times (i.e., a reactor or pressure vessel), can it actually withstand that cycle? So that was the big thing: Can the five mile long well actually withstand that temperature, pressure cycle, and then move or deform during the HIPing process without a failure? 

Secondly, if you look at a traditional HIP cycle, what does that temperature, pressure, and hold time do to the material? Can you break it up into ramp up time, ramp up pressure, ramp up temperature, and then hold time, etc., and see microstructural changes, property changes, performance changes as a function of each of these segments that we use or take for granted for the HIP cycle. Those are more science-driven questions that we need to answer.  Thirdly, where some of the challenges that we have encountered [with scalability]. When we did a PM HIP workshop here at Oak Ridge last year in October, we had about a couple of hundred people show up from academia, national labs, DOD and DOE, customers, stakeholders, etc. The question was, what is the scalability of a part when you go from a small to large part or small to a more complex part in terms of powder compaction, size and scale of the powders, property variations, and chemistry? That is another PM HIP question that we are trying to solve.

At the end of the day, the goal is to make sure that the industry can adopt this more freely and employ it for large scale production. Then, also giving them the option of using additive cans — a more customized shell. The good thing about AM and PM combination, if you choose that, is that you can use AM can as a “shell,” which you can remove afterwards or keep. When you keep it, you are basically looking at a HIP-clad type of option where you can use similar or dissimilar materials and depending on the functionality of the surface versus the core, you can utilize that combination of two materials with two different manufacturing modalities. 

I think the workshop that we had in October last year was exceptionally well received from our end. It was driven for the voice of the customers — what does the customer want from us? What are the gaps and challenges around PM HIP that would really remove some of the angst that they have.  

That was the first thing that we did, but we also had people from the powder side, from the modeling side. 

Victor was leading the attendees, Dave Gandy was there giving plenty of talks about the need for PM HIP. Cliff was there talking about the utilization of HIP as a technology. We had industries from every bit of the segment come in and they wanted to help. 

The thought was, can we actually take personal spaces out and then talk and have a cross interaction across industries to try to solve a problem on national level. Like Victor and Dave said, we need our government to instill the idea that this is an important technology for the country. Can we move towards this? We were facilitating that and saying what the voice of the customer is. This is what everybody wants. The demand is absolutely there. Can we actually build on it?  

At the next workshop that we plan, we want to actually talk about real parts. We will be bringing in real parts to see how we can make it PM HIP. What are the success factors around it? I think that would be more end-product driven rather than the science part of the discussion.    

Doug Glenn: Yes, more practical and specific and less theoretical, if you will, but not that it was all theory. 

Soumya Nag: We have an active PM HIP steering committee with about twenty people from industry. Dave, Victor, and Cliff are a part of it. They have been tremendous in terms of providing us with guidance and seamless thoughts in terms of how we should move as an industry. 

Doug Glenn: Is that next workshop scheduled? 

Soumya Nag: Not yet, but that is in the planning process right now. 

Doug Glenn: We’ll certainly help publish that when the time comes, so keep us posted.  

Soumya Nag: We have a report from the first workshop that is in limbo right now, but we will publish it relatively soon.  

It discusses what we learned from the workshop, the gaps and challenges, and how we should move forward. We have about a 60 to 65-page report that we compiled from that workshop. These are the demand signals for everybody that we compiled together.  

Doug Glenn: Let us know if we can help you publish that as well and help you get it out to the right people.  

Toll Manufacturing vs. Ownership of Equipment (55:47)

Doug Glenn: Cliff, let’s discuss the differences between toll processing and ownership of equipment. When it comes to HIPing, does it make sense for manufacturing companies to send their HIPing out to toll manufacturers or is it better to buy your own equipment?  

Cliff Orcutt: That’s an economical question that you have to calculate and look at. Number one, if you only have one part, you’re not going to buy a HIP unit. 

Evaluating the cost of toll processing versus purchasing your own HIPing equipment. Basic rule of thumb: use toll HIPing until you cannot afford it, then go in-house.

But if you have the quantity and the quality, and the cost works to the favor of owning your own HIP unit, then you should purchase it. However, if you also don’t have the floor space, location, people, or infrastructure to support it, then sometimes it’s easier to toll HIP. If you’re in the middle of nowhere and your parts are lead, and you can’t afford to ship them, then you might want to have your own HIP unit located in your facility. It’s important to analyze these aspects to decide if there’s ROI and if it’s the best way to economically make your parts.

Doug Glenn: Mike, what are your thoughts on toll processing versus owning your own? 

Mike Conaway: I think you toll process until you can’t stand the cost anymore, and then you bring it in house.  

You plan the investment for it. There may be tipping points, I don’t know how to quantify those. But I think that Cliff’s remarks are well taken. It’s a little bit complicated and you have to have a believer; let’s say you’re a user of HIP equipment and you’re getting it done by toll. Sometimes you don’t want to have it; you don’t have anybody in-house that has insight into HIPing and therefore is not a champion for it. I recommend toll HIPing until you can’t afford it, and then we go in-house.  

Used Equipment Market for HIP (58:26) 

Doug Glenn: Let’s discuss the International HIP Conference. 

Cliff Orcutt: The 2028 conference is going to be held in South Korea in the town of Busan, very beautiful. And it’ll be a great conference, so we’re hoping to have over 200 people at it. 

It will cover all aspects of HIPing, not just powder metallurgy, but it’s all the latest technology from the makers, the toll people. Everybody that’s in the HIP industry is usually there from all countries. Hopefully by 2028 we can have the Eastern Block Country there attending again as well. 

Doug Glenn: If I remember correctly, it was in Columbus in 2022. 

Cliff Orcutt: Yes, 2022 in Columbus, 2025 in Germany. It moves from USA to Europe to Asia every three years.  

Doug Glenn: The committee is a group of people who have a common interest in putting this together. 

Mike Conaway: Yes, it’s group of enthusiasts.  

Doug Glenn: The most recent one was this year in Aachen, Germany, right?  

Mike Conaway: Yes.  

Doug Glenn: How many people attended that one?  

Victor Samarov: Around 250.  

Doug Glenn: HIP 2025 is currently on the website, and then when you’re ready, you’re going to have a HIP 2028. 

Cliff Orcutt: It’s reserved, and it’ll be coming online probably next year. 

The paper from 2025 has been released and made available to people.  

Doug Glenn: Anybody else have any other comment on the HIP event?  

Soumya Nag: It was my first time going there.  

I felt that it was a great exposure to what the world is doing on the PM HIP side. Sometimes we are bottled down in what we are doing in the U.S., and we think we are doing the best thing in the world. That’s not true. There are countries who are superseding us and they have ideas and thoughts and future goals which are very possible for them to succeed. We want to make sure that we learn from them and really act upon that.  

Cliff Orcutt: One thing we might want to mention is the Metal Powder Industry Federation, MPIF, for about 15 years has been promoting it as a green technology. I think that we all could agree that we should lean green, towards green things.

There’s less energy usage, less machining. It’s a near net shape technology, and so even if it does economically cost more, we still should look at it from that green aspect, I believe.  

Doug Glenn: And you’re talking just about HIPing in general or PM HIP?

Cliff Orcutt: Mainly PM, but all forms of would be more of a green technology compared to your big carbon melting type technologies. 

Doug Glenn: Good point, Cliff, thank you.

All right, gentlemen, thanks very much. I appreciate your time, your expertise, and it’s been a pleasure talking with you all.

About the Guests

Mike Conaway
Managing Director
Isostatic Forging International

   

Mike Conaway is the managing director at Isostatic Forging International. He began in the HIP field at 19 years old, where the process was invented and developed (Battelle Institute in Columbus, Ohio). Many consider Mike a pioneer in the business of HIP equipment: analysis design, construction and operations. He has ten issued patents related to high pressure design, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International HIP Committee. 

For more information: Contact Mike at conaway@hot-isostatic.com or visit his LinkedIn.

David Gandy
Principal Technical Executive, Nuclear Materials
EPRI

David Gandy is the principal technical executive in the Nuclear Materials sector for EPRI. He has 40+ years of experience in materials, welding, and advanced manufacturing. He is an ASM International Fellow and currently also is a member of ASME Section III. 

For more information: Contact David at davgandy@epri.com or visit his LinkedIn.

Oscar Martinez
Regional Sales Manager
HIP North America, Bodycote

Oscar Martinez is the regional sales manager of HIP North America, Bodycote. He is a metallurgical and materials engineer with a degree from the University of Texas at El Paso. In 2022, he took his current position for the Hot Isostatic Pressure and Powdermet® divisions at Bodycote IMT, serving the North American market.

For more information: Contact Oscar at Oscar.Martinez@bodycote.com or visit his LinkedIn.

Soumya Nag
Group Leader of Materials Science and Technology
Oak Ridge National Library

Soumya Nag is in the group leader of the Materials Science and Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research interest is understanding processing (additive and conventional) — structure (phase transformation across different length and time scales) — property (mechanical and environmental property) relationships in light weight and high temperature structural alloys. 

For more information: Contact Soumya at nags@ornl.gov or visit his LinkedIn.

Cliff Orcutt
Vice President
American Isostatic Presses, Inc.

Cliff Orcutt is vice president of American Isostatic Presses, Inc. and has been involved in more than 200 HIP installations in 25 countries over a 48 year span. Orcutt is Chaiman of the International HIP Committee , helping to organize the HIP22 and HIP25 conferences to spread HIP knowledge. 

For more information: Contact Cliff at corcutt@aiphip.com or visit his LinkedIn.

Victor Samarov
Vice President of Engineering
Synertech PM

Victor Samarov is the vice president of Engineering for Synertech PM. He has a masters degree in mechanical engineering from MPTU in Russia and a Ph.D. and full doctor’s degree from VILS Russia. He has spent over 45 years in PM HIP, and has over 250 publications and over 50 issues patents. With more than 45 years of experience in powder metallurgy and hot isostatic pressing (PM HIP), he has authored over 250 publications and is the holder of more than 50 patents. 

For more information: Contact Victor at Victor@synertechpm.com or visit his LinkedIn.

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.Com

Heat Treat Radio #126:  HIP Finds New Life in Modern Manufacturing Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #125: On-Site Hydrogen Generation — A Reliable Path for Heat Treaters

/ ATMOSPHERE GENERATORS TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, Manufacturing Heat Treat Technical Content

Hydrogen is essential for many heat treating processes, but what happens when your supply runs out?

In today’s episode of Heat Treat Radio, Devon Landry of Nel Hydrogen joins Heat Treat Radio Host Doug Glenn to discuss the potential risks of delivered gas and how on-site generation can secure reliable, high-purity hydrogen. This episode highlights the advantages of on-site generation and what questions to ask before making the switch. 

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Hydrogen Usage in Thermal Processing (4:05) 

Doug Glenn: All right, let’s talk hydrogen. I think the first thing I’d like to do is talk about the basics, how hydrogen is used and what it’s used for in thermal processing. 

Can you give us a 30,000-foot view on hydrogen and why are we using it in thermal processes? 

Devon Landry: Hydrogen is widely used in heat treat and processing. It’s a powerful reducing agent for surface cleaning and sintering success.  

Hydrogen scavenges oxygen, counteracting minor furnace leaks.
Photo Credit: Nel Hydrogen

It has the highest heat conductivity of any gas, so we can enter and exit parts quicker. It has lower density relative to air and nitrogen, which makes it really straightforward to manage. It burns off easily, readily, cleanly. The only true byproduct of that would be water.  

Doug Glenn: We are talking about the security of hydrogen supply.  

How important is it for people who need hydrogen to have it, and what happens if they don’t have it — what are the risks here? 

Devon Landry: My predecessor, Dave Wolff, used to say it’s like yeast for a pizzeria. It’s a very small part of the cost, but if you don’t have yeast, you don’t have pizza. If you don’t have pizza, you don’t have business. So if you don’t have hydrogen, you can’t really run your processes. 

The same with running out of hydrogen. If you’re halfway through a batch and you run out of hydrogen, that whole batch is done. If that batch isn’t finished and you don’t have any hydrogen left, you don’t have business. You have to send employees home and stop your production. You can run into a lot of problems. 

Doug Glenn: If you’re processing high-value parts, it’s not just a matter of simply running out of parts and not being able to finish the load. That load could be worth a quarter of a million dollars.  

Devon Landry: That’s correct, the parts are completely done; you won’t be able to use those parts — it’s a completely wasted batch. So, you would lose money, not just from excess production, but that batch as well. 

On-Site Hydrogen Generation vs. Supplied (06:25) 

Doug Glenn: There’s different ways of getting your hydrogen, it can be supplied or Nel, the company you’re with, supplies the equipment to manufacture hydrogen on-site. What type of risks are companies exposing themselves to if they are not generating their own hydrogen? 

Devon Landry: Delivered hydrogen is really the only other way to get your hydrogen, and that’s through industrial gas suppliers. I see a shortfall in the future, especially with liquid hydrogen production. There are many hydrogen plants that are getting canceled or delayed. 

Supply chain and hydrogen requirements for Artemis rocket

You see, it costs a lot of money to make these plants, and if the financial advisors deem that the plant is not going to make money, they’re not going to do it.  

For the Artemis rocket, that takes a full day’s production of liquid hydrogen in the U.S. to fill up. And there are many projects out there that are requiring liquid hydrogen, which is why I see a shortfall coming.  

If you can’t get the hydrogen from your industrial gas supplier, where are you going to get it?  

That’s where Nel Hydrogen comes in. With generating on-site, you take control of your hydrogen supply.  

Doug Glenn: You mentioned that you foresee a lack of supply and that some of these hydrogen plants aren’t being approved. 

Why aren’t these plants being approved to be built? 

Devon Landry: They cost a lot of money to build and industrial gas companies have a long-term strategic focus, with capital discipline kind of upfront. If you’re going to build a plant and shareholders are not going to see any returns on it, then they’re not going to do it. 

So we’ve seen a lot of cancellations. They haven’t really have a good commitment to shareholder value, and they emphasize on strong fundamentals there.  

Doug Glenn: At one point in time, there was a lot of talk about hydrogen fuel cells. And everybody wanted to do hydrogen. I haven’t heard much about that recently. Do you think that might have something to do with the cooling off of the hydrogen market? 

Devon Landry: Yes, I think so. There was a hydrogen world out there, and people really wanted to build new plants, have fueling stations. There’s so much you can do with hydrogen. But policies around hydrogen are affected by different administrations. With the current administration, they’re taking some of those incentives away. So there’s not as much money being provided as an incentive.  

Doug Glenn: This is all the more reason to be very careful about your hydrogen supply. Not only your current hydrogen supply, but in the future. With politics and different administrations, sometimes hydrogen fuel cells is on, then it’s off. As a result, supplies may be a bit dicey. Therefore, it’s probably well worth people paying close attention to where they’re getting their hydrogen now and what the future looks like. 

Your input is really important here.  

Proton Exchange Membrane (10:23) 

Hydrogen cleans part surfaces to enhance processing results.
Photo Credit: Nel Hydrogen

Doug Glenn: Tell me about PEM; what does that stand for? 

Devon Landry: PEM stands for proton exchange membrane. It’s a differential pressure system, where hydrogen is allowed to pass through the membrane but oxygen cannot. 

We’re taking ultra pure water with a resistivity of greater than one mega ohm. That’s going through into the cell stack and the electrolysis takes place there. The hydrogen is allowed to pass through that membrane; the oxygen is not. So, the hydrogen goes towards the process. 

Doug Glenn: Oxygen and/or water is the only byproduct.  

Devon Landry: Yes, and it returns to the main reservoir, and that oxygen gets vented, either out of vent stack or into the room. 

Doug Glenn: The primary markets that Nel Hydrogen serves are mostly industrial, and Nel can also do much larger units. Can you tell me about that? 

Devon Landry: With alkaline and PEM both, we can do megawatt style units. I handle primarily the industrial units, and we can go all the way up to 100, 200, 300 megawatt systems — a very vast range. 

Doug Glenn: Most businesses in our industry would not need that much, but it’s good for our people to know that you guys have expertise, not just in the sizes that are good for them, but larger sizes as well. 

Nel Series hydrogen generators
Source: Nel Hydrogen

PEM Process vs. Alkaline (12:05) 

Doug Glenn: We have discussed the PEM process. Can you explain the difference between how the hydrogen is extracted from the PEM process vs. alkaline? 

Devon Landry: The alkaline system uses KOH, which is highly corrosive and dangerous to handle. You have to fill it up, so there’s a safety aspect with that. In addition, the purity that you’re getting out of the alkaline process is not quite as high as PEM. I think it’s 90%, but it can be 97 to 98%.   

With the PEM process, the only output you’re getting is hydrogen and some water, and we mitigate that water with a dryer inside the system. We get five nines purity plus: 99.999% purity plus. 

You really need that purity in a lot of the heat treating processes to give you the coloration of the pieces that you’re putting through. With the industrial gas suppliers, you often have to pay a premium to have higher purity. Many times, when you send those cylinders or a tube trailer back to get it refilled, they do not test it to find out exactly what the purity is unless you specifically request that. So your purity might differ every now and then, which means you’re not going to get the exact effect on your process that you would like.  

The way the industrial suppliers are making that hydrogen is through steam methane reforming. It’s very energy-intensive, and carbon is a major by-product of that process.  

Our machines are as carbon free as your electricity supply line: if you’re feeding it with solar and wind energy sources, utilizing renewable energy, then you are at a zero carbon footprint. 

Doug Glenn: You would have true green hydrogen. If your electricity supplier was green, then you would be really producing green hydrogen, which would be very good.   

Delivered Gas vs. Hydrogen Generation (14:55)  

Doug Glenn: What questions should companies be asking if they are considering moving away from bulk or delivered gas to on-site hydrogen generation?  

Devon Landry: To have a hydrogen generator on-site, you need to know your flow and your pressure. There are going to be operational and capital costs.  

The capital costs are a little larger with the hydrogen generator. So you’ll need to know how much gas you’re using and what pressure you’re using at. We have calculators to determine which unit would be best for you based on those questions. 

If the capital costs are a little too high, which they are for some companies, then we do have leasing options that will help with that capital cost. We can break it down monthly, even for a 10-year period of what you would be spending for your delivered gas versus a hydrogen generator on-site. 

Doug Glenn: So, you can do that analysis for businesses if they can provide their current expenditures for delivered hydrogen and usage, and then you can do a comparison to advise them on what it would cost if they were to transition to on-site generation? 

Devon Landry: Yes, exactly. Industrial gas suppliers can come with a lot of bills, so you have to pay attention. There could be a trailer rental fees, cylinder rental fees, delivery fees — a lot of bills combining into one. They also generally require signing a contract with them that could be seven plus years, and you have to provide quite a long notice to be relieved of those contract obligations as well. 

Doug Glenn: The capital cost could potentially be different, meaning probably more for an on-site generator for hydrogen. When you think of bulk gases, the operating costs are quite low for delivered gas.  

How about operational costs for hydrogen? 

Devon Landry: The cost of hydrogen generation is going to be the cost of your electricity. The price per kilowatt is going to tell you how much cost per standard cubic foot that you’re going to be paying for it. 

Doug Glenn: Electricity is really the only major cost operationally. How about maintenance costs? 

Devon Landry: The maintenance cost depends on which machine you select. We build maintenance costs right into the calculator that tells you how much the costs will be per year. There’s a quarterly maintenance cost, which is just basically a calibration, and then a yearly maintenance kit that you can put in yourself. 

Doug Glenn: Do you need to have any special personnel to run it or is it self-maintaining? 

Devon Landry: It pretty much takes care of itself. If there’s a problem with it, a pop up will let you know the problem, and you can go to the manual to learn exactly what the problem is. If you have a regular maintenance crew on site, many power plants have these, then you usually have somebody that can do it. 

It’s generally filter changes and updates like that. 

Community Perception on Hydrogen Generation (18:25)  

Doug Glenn: Pertaining to public perception, how has the community responded to hydrogen generation?  

Devon Landry: Most people like it better. We like to refer to it as the good neighbor benefit. Would you rather look outside and see a gigantic tank full of combustible gas or a quarter inch, stainless steel line?  

Fire marshals love it because we store less than seven standard cubic feet on our biggest machine, internally.  

And then when we hit the stop button, or if the generator shuts down, the hydrogen is all vented out into the atmosphere. There’s no stored hydrogen — only a minimal amount inside the machine. 

Doug Glenn: No rocket ships in your backyard. 

Devon Landry: Looking out the window, I’d rather see the sky and some bushes rather than a big tank. 

Is Hydrogen Generation Right for Your Company? (19:30) 

Doug Glenn:  Are there instances where generating hydrogen on-site doesn’t make sense for a company or when bulk delivery is a better deal? 

Devon Landry: This is why we have those calculators. I don’t need a company buying a generator if it’s not going to save them money or if it’s not going to be easier for you. It’s really only practical when you’re under 10,000 standard cubic feet per hour. 

Doug Glenn: Is that amount for a very large industrial manufacturing plant? 

Devon Landry: Yes, that’s quite a bit. 

Doug Glenn: Is there any amount that’s too small in which it wouldn’t make sense to have a generator? 

Devon Landry: No, our smaller generators put out about 10 standard cubic feet per hour, about 4.9 liters per minute, and it’s on-demand. If you need the smallest amount possible, they’ll put that out for you. If you don’t need any further for the interim, it will basically sit there in idle. These generators are fully on-demand and give you exactly what you need. 

Doug Glenn: Which companies currently are out there that it really makes sense for them to look at on-site hydrogen generation? 

Devon Landry: Really, anybody that needs hydrogen. If you’re not excited about your delivered hydrogen, if you’re having issues with it, if the cost is too high, we have a lot of different industries that we run with. Many are heat treating and metal processing business. There’s also chromatography, gas chromatography, MOCVD, many different industries. If you have delivered hydrogen, generating hydrogen on-site would be worth looking into. 

Final Thoughts (22:45) 

Doug Glenn: Where is the corporate headquarters or the world headquarters for Nel Hydrogen? 

Devon Landry: Nel Hydrogen is headquartered in Oslo, Norway. 

Doug Glenn: How long has company existed?  

Devon Landry: It started in 1927. 

Doug Glenn: Where’s the main headquarters in the U.S. or North America? 

Devon Landry: We’re in, Wallingford, Connecticut, and all of our PEM machines are built there. 

Doug Glenn: Very good. I’d like to thank all the everyone for listening.  

Hopefully you found this episode enjoyable and informative. Thanks again, Devon. Appreciate you being here. 

About the Guest

Devon Landry
Senior Field Engineer and Technical Lead
Nel Hydrogen

Devon Landry has been an integral part of Nel for 16 years, establishing himself as a leading expert in industrial on-site hydrogen generators. With over 15 years as a Senior Field Engineer and Technical Lead in Technical Service and Customer Support, he has played a key role in delivering top-tier service and expertise to Nel’s global customer base. His extensive experience includes traveling more than 3 million miles worldwide, working across diverse industries and customer sites. 

Beyond his technical proficiency, Devon brings strong leadership and business acumen. As an entrepreneur, he successfully founded and managed a craft brewery and taproom in Connecticut for six years, leading a team of seven employees. This experience further enhanced his ability to blend technical expertise with strategic management and operations. 

For more information: Contact Devon at dlandry@nelhydrogen.com 

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.Com

Heat Treat Radio #125: On-Site Hydrogen Generation — A Reliable Path for Heat Treaters Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #124: Solving Aluminum Distortion Challenges with Uphill Quenching

/ AEROSPACE HEAT TREAT TECHNICAL CONTENT, ALUMINUM PROCESSING TECHNICAL CONTENT, ANNEALING TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, QUENCHING TECHNICAL CONTENT

What do Mars rovers, sniper pods, and rotor grips have in common? Uphill quenching — a thermal-mechanical technique that uses liquid nitrogen and high-velocity steam to dramatically reduce stress and distortion.

In today’s episode of Heat Treat Radio, Greg Newton, Newton Heat Treating CEO, joins host Doug Glenn to take a dive deep into this little-known but highly effective process for controlling residual stress in aluminum alloys. Guest John Avalos, Newton’s quality engineer and IT/Digital Transformation Manager, joins the conversation.

Get the full picture of how this thermal-mechanical method improves machinability, enhances precision, and extends component life, especially in aerospace and optical applications.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (2:20)

Before we even start talking about the process, let’s talk about your qualifications and experience. How did you get in heat treating and aluminum heat treating?

Greg Newton: In 1968, my father opened up a heat treating facility in the city of industry. From age 13 on, I had a summer job and weekend job. It’s part of my blood. In the early ‘70s, we were the first heat treater to purchase an X-ray diffraction machine, which is a non-destructive way of checking for residual stresses beneath the surface of aluminum alloy and different alloys; we concentrated on aluminum. It’s an old analog Rigaku machine; it’s still running. It gives me great data, so why change it out for a half-million-dollar new machine? That’s how we got started.

There was a pilot project with Northrop Grumman for controlling residual stresses, taking glycol out of the laboratory and putting it in production. Now, one thing I didn’t like about that project was that we gave all the data to Northrop and then they wrote a spec and gave it to the world. I didn’t feel we got our fair payback for it.

When the M1 tank optics came along and they knew we had X-ray diffraction on premises, they wanted to take something basically out of the laboratories. The patent names it “thermal mechanical uphill quenching,” which describes the process perfectly. We use it because of the residual stresses created during the quench cycle. When you go from roughly 1000°F down to room temperature rapidly, that’s what sets up your mechanical properties in aluminum.

What Is Uphill Quenching (5:02)

Doug Glenn: Let’s take a 30,000-foot view for someone who has no concept of what an aluminum alloy is. What is uphill quenching?

Greg Newton: It’s the inverse process of the quenching cycle in the solution heat treat cycle. You’re going roughly from 1000°F to room temperature, hot to cold. A part can’t cool instantly. What happens? The outside cools first. It shrinks, and you get a compressive shell. By the laws of thermodynamics, I have an equal and opposite action happening in the core of that part. So, it develops tensile stresses to hold up that compressive shell. They’re in equilibrium when I’m done with the part and I send it back to the machine shop.

Then, they’re going to remove material from one side; they’re going to gun drill it. That’s when challenges arise, because at the point of after-quench, we have the compressive shell and the tensile stresses in the core. They are in equilibrium. When I remove material away, that compressive shell moves, and that’s where aluminum becomes very difficult to machine.

Newton Heat Treating’s thermal processing equipment Source: Newton Heat Treating

Doug Glenn: Does uphill quenching solve this problem?

Greg Newton: It solves the problem, for all parts, all shapes, all sizes. Parts that don’t lend themselves to flip flopping, which never solves the problem. You might machine away some compressive shell, rejig the part, flip it over, remove a little of the compression on the other side, but you still have those tensiles. The tensiles are the bad guys. That’s what’s causing a failure in use and propagating cracks.

Doug Glenn: Tensile stresses are the ones pushing out, whereas the compressive strengths are the ones that are pulling in.

Greg Newton: And a compressor shell can actually be advantageous for certain types of fatigue, like creep.

Doug Glenn: Is uphill quenching predominantly done on aluminum or exclusively done on aluminum?

Greg Newton: It is predominantly done on aluminum. We’ve done a little bit on titanium. It had fair results with it. Alcoa developed uphill quenching in the late ‘50s. That’s how old this technology; it’s nothing new. Back then, though, engineers used to design things 2.5 times as robust as they needed to be, just because we didn’t know how much residual stresses were inherent in the manufacturing of these parts. But now, with trying to get aircraft, car, and all other types of components to be as light and as thin as possible, this process comes into play. It has finally come of age.

Neutralizing Stresses with Uphill Quenching (7:50)

Doug Glenn: So you have the compressive and tensile stresses, and uphill quenching basically is helping to neutralize or to balance those so that when you go to machining and you’re doing some machining, you’re not going to get what you would anticipate with a distortion or something of that sort.

Greg Newton: Well, again, we go back to the original patent name that describes the process perfectly. Thermal, mechanical, uphill grade. We’re not stretching it with a hydraulic press to 1.5–3% to dislocate the lattices. We’re using a thermal gradient. That’s our energy. That’s our machine.

It’s a little hard to wrap your head around. We’re going to compress and get the dislocation that way. Well, what put those stresses in was that thermal gradient of the quench roughly going from 1000°F to room temperature. How can we reverse that? Aluminum, unlike steels, is almost annealed soft in an as-quenched (AQ) condition.

So that is the optimum time, as the original patent tells you. There are so many misconceptions out there. When you do it in a hardened condition, you’ve lined up everything against yourself. You’ve increased yield strength. You want to do it when the material is as soft as possible. For aluminum, you want to either do it immediately after quench, within an hour, or retard the natural aging by putting it in a sub-zero freezer.

Doug Glenn: The uphill quenching is neutralizing those stresses, so there could be further processing without as much “fear.”

Greg Newton: That’s correct. We’re going to go from -320°F and heat it up with a high-velocity steam blast, back up past room temperature.

Doug Glenn: We’ll get to the actual process, I just wanted to make sure we’re understanding why we’re doing it.

Greg Newton: The machinability of aluminum are close-tolerance parts: They diamond hone our laser optics to a millionth of an inch in aluminum.

Doug Glenn: Wow.

John Avalos: That’s a tight tolerance.

Doug Glenn: Yeah, that’s a tight tolerance. So basically, uphill quenching is just the inverse of the quench.

Greg Newton: That’s all it is.

Doug Glenn: Coming downhill on the quench, then we’re going back uphill. Is this similar to a temper process for a ferrous material?

Greg Newton: We’re not changing any of the mechanical properties. All we’re doing is a realignment of the lattice parameter of the inner crystalline structure.

Doug Glenn: That sounds so different.

Greg Newton: If you picture that compression pushing in and the tensiles pulling out, we’re relaxing them back to a neutral state.

Want to read more about the Newton Heat Treating’s story? Click the image for a full article.

John Avalos: But the main point is that it doesn’t change the temper at all.

Greg Newton: It does not change any of the mechanical properties.

Doug Glenn: Is uphill quenching predominantly or exclusively used in aerospace or are there other markets where you use it as well?

Greg Newton: There are other markets — any close-tolerance parts in aluminum and the alloys. It’s extremely effective on all alloys; 6061 is used in the laser industries or laser optics. We do a lot with the optical industry.

Doug Glenn: So it’s not just aerospace, but a good chunk of it is.

Greg Newton: Nothing on Mars hasn’t come through our hands. I mean, all the gating and sending antennas, all the optical housings, the wheels even were cold stabilized, because they’re trying to make them so light. They’d gun drill them and they would collapse.

Doug Glenn: Did you say “nothing on Mars”?

Greg Newton: All the parts for the Mars rovers have come through our facility.

Actually, our first parts were on Voyager. We’d been looking at this process, and JPL (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) came to us requesting us to try uphill quenching the parts. Dr. Martin Lo from JPL hand-carried these parts over that are still sending data on Voyager that is outside the influence of our sun. Isn’t that incredible?

Doug Glenn: That is incredible. I think it’s just so fascinating what this industry does that people don’t know about.

Getting Technical: The Uphill Quenching Process (12:37)

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump into it and talk technical. What is involved in the uphill quenching process?

Greg Newton: You take these heat treated parts and either perform the uphill quench within an hour or retard the natural agent, that’s key. There are companies that try to uphill quench in a hardened state, and you will get some reduction in stresses, probably more than you will get from any straight thermal stress relief where you’re just lowering the yield strength and popping some of the lattices, but this is nowhere near what you’ll get in an AQ condition.

Doug Glenn: Timeliness is important here. That’s probably the first point.

Greg Newton: Very, very important. So some of the equipment you’ll need includes a large door, depending on how big the part is. And you know, we have a 3,000-gallon tank here on premises and we are ready to put a 6,000-gallon one in. Then, all you’re utilizing the LN2 for is its coldness. It’s not like other steel heat treaters and stuff where it’s in the atmosphere. We’re just using it for…

Doug Glenn: Let me interrupt you, Greg. You said an acronym. What is LN2?

Greg Newton: Liquid nitrogen.

Doug Glenn: I assumed, but just want to make sure.

Greg Newton: The boiling point at sea level is -320°F.

Doug Glenn: So you’re taking it down.

Greg Newton: Right. You also need some sort of steam boiler or steam generator; we have both on premises. You may need an accumulator depending on the size of the parts you’re doing, because you’re using the steam, trying to reverse the delta T of the quench as fast as possible.

John Avalos: It’s a rapid process.

Doug Glenn: That’s why steam is very effective at rapidly heating.

Greg Newton: As the original report tells you, the difference is that you’ll get over 80% reduction in stresses utilizing LN2 and steam versus boiling water. The maximum’s around 19%. We’ve done our own testing and have gotten about 20% — so, significantly higher. Doing it in an AQ condition is key. The original report tells you that you get nothing out of doing the process in a hardened condition, which is done by many of my competitors.

We’ll do it any way the client wants it. While we have boiling water capabilities, but I try to talk the client into doing it the preferred way, which is in an AQ condition with LN2 to steam. That’s how you get to your biggest temperature differential, your delta T. You’re trying to match the delta T of the quench of the heat treat quench in reverse. That’s all you’re trying to do.

Doug Glenn: It sounds simple. So far, we have covered needing aluminum as-quenched, as soon as possible. You’re dipping it into LN2 to take it down to -320°F, roughly. Right?

Greg Newton: Depending on the thickness of part, it’s not a soaking cycle like solution heat treating would be, but you do want to make sure that part is completely at that temperature.

Doug Glenn: So you’re taking it down to -320°F, then immediately taking it out, and you’re hitting it with steam for how long, and what’s the criteria?

Greg Newton: It depends on the size, the shape, and the configuration. We have many, many steam fixtures out here that can be slightly modified. If you have a good production run, it’s best to design a fixture specific to that part. Bell Helicopter does this for the rotor grips for the Hueys when they were re-engineered.

Doug Glenn: Are you taking it up then to a specific temperature?

Greg Newton: Yes, we want be above 160°F for casting; 180°F, we prefer, for raw product.

Doug Glenn: Okay, and once it’s back up to that temperature, is the process done?

Greg Newton: You are done. Now there are many specs that repeat the process. I think this is mostly to make up for lack of fixturing, a part-specific fixture, so you can make up with subsequent processing. It does come out of the history of the past of when they really didn’t understand, before the original patent. There used to be tricyclic stress relieving where they would take it from dry ice into boiling water.

One of the advantages of steam, and the reason why you get much better results with steam versus boiling water, is the fact that it’s a higher temperature. It blasts away any ice that’s forming on that part, on the surface of it and it’s a turbulent flow over that part. So it readily transmits that energy quicker.

John Avalos: Can you also talk about the X-ray diffraction and how you use that to measure how effective the process is?

Greg Newton: When we took over this project and we wanted to prove it out, we learned a lot of things. When an engineer patents something, he usually controls everything. And it’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that they are .000001% right. In the real world, it makes no difference. So, you tend to throw those things away because they have no real relevance here on earth or in space.

So, we stumbled upon some other things that were advantageous to buy X-ray diffraction.

The standard operation involved first, getting the part, heat treating it, and then directly after quench, and take a reading because we know after a solution heat treated, we have that perfect setup between the compressive shell and the tensiles and the core. They’re going to be equal. Or close to it.

The thicker the section of the part, the more stresses, because it takes longer to cool. When you get into parts with two-inch cross sections and quarter-inch webbing, that’s when you get a lot of oil canning and all hell breaks loose. We can solve that.

I remember there was a bot part we had for the 767 or 757. It was the pilot’s window, and they were failing in service. The bot had a whole shift Boeing was paying to re-machine all out-of-tolerance parts on the shelf, until they finally they were over-machined and had to be thrown away. We had a hard time. I did parts for nothing to prove it to them, and they adopted it. But then the union fought them, and now that division is closed.

You have to evolve or else you will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Doug Glenn: You can’t fight with science. Ultimately you can’t fight with the truth of metallurgy.

I think we have the basic process down; it doesn’t sound that complicated. It’s a reverse of the quench process, essentially.

“Aluminum alloy 6061 is a forgiving alloy…It lends itself to uphill quenching because of its lower yield than the 7,000 series. We also do work in the 7,000 series.”
Source: Theworldmaterial.com

Greg Newton: Attention must be paid to the details, though.

Doug Glenn: Yes, exactly. I have talked with a couple of other people about this process, and I’ve been told that the aluminum alloy is somewhat important in the process depending on what alloy you have. Is that the case?

Greg Newton: Aluminum alloy 6061 is a forgiving alloy, and most of the optics we do are some form of that. It’s a forgiving alloy in many, many ways. It lends itself to uphill quenching because of its lower yield than the 7000 series. We also do work in the 7000 series. It takes a little better steam fixture, perhaps a little more attention to detail. Rough machining comes into play, regarding how much rough machining is done prior to the final solution heat treat and the uphill quench.

John Avalos: There are lots of factors.

Greg Newton: We like to be involved in the beginning, not as an after fact. The best successes we’ve had is when the company knows it’s going to be a problem part, so they get us involved in the beginning. Then, we set it up right and everything goes smoothly, instead of after.

Doug Glenn: You had mentioned the X-ray diffraction and the testing of it. Is there anything more we want to say on that?

Greg Newton: After the solution heat treat, I’m going to get that perfect ratio of my compressive shell and the tensiles. After the uphill quench, we’ll measure again, and then once after aging, because aging can have a slight effect on your stress levels.

That will give us an internal baseline, and we do it for all clients on all first articles. I encourage clients to pay for it, but to a lot of machinists, it’s just an extra cost. But should they ever have a problem in the future? The proof has always been in the pudding. I send it back to them because I can’t tell you how many skeptics we’ve had that call me back and say, “dang, it really worked.” And then they think it’s that magic. Some of the failures that have come from the successes and thinking, “Now I can make up the lost time. I’m going to make twice the cuts, twice as deep, twice as fast.” Then you induce stresses by machining parts.

Newton Heat Treating’s equipment for cold stabilization
Source: Newton Heat Treating

Doug Glenn: You mentioned that when the engineer initially does the patent, they control everything; they put a lot of standards in there. It sounds to me that in your practical application of this process, you found out which one of those instructions are important, and which ones are maybe not as important.

Greg Newton: We have completely refined the process.

Doug Glenn: Now you know you don’t need to waste time on item X because it really doesn’t matter so much. The correlation for success may be more tied with another item.

Greg Newton: The boiling water aspect becomes so appealing to my competition because you don’t need to use your brain to design steam fixtures and other processes. We have designed many steam fixtures over the years, and they’re semi generic. We can change the inserts for cylindrical parts. We have found it’s very advantageous to steam inside and out, simultaneously. When it says high-pressure steam, I have engineers up with their cameras and I say, “No, no, back away about 30 feet.”

Doug Glenn: Step back from the part. That sounds interesting. The design of the fixtures for the impingement of the steam sounds very similar to me to something we’ve talked to Joe Powell of Akron Steel about. He talks about that high-intensity quench, not uphill quenching, but downhill quenching in this case, where it’s really super critical that you quickly and uniformly cool the entire outer shell at the same time.

It sounds like these fixtures you’re talking about are somewhat along that same line that they need to be hitting the part at the right place, right time, right volume.

John Avalos: They represent the configuration of the part as close as we can anyways, so that we get a nice even steam blast.

Greg Newton: We’ll tend to concentrate steam in thicker areas, back off on thinner areas.

Challenges in Uphill Quenching (25:00)

Doug Glenn: What are the biggest challenges that you face when performing uphill quenching?

Greg Newton: Overcoming the misconceptions of when and how to do it can be challenging as there are so much different variables. We have capacity for boiling water and steam, but we prefer to do the best method possible, and give my clients the best, because the price is the same. I’d rather have a happy client. Then, I think, boiling water sometimes gives it a bad name when it doesn’t work. They often throw out the entire system, the baby with the bath water.

Cyclic thermal shock process
Source: Newton Heat Treating

Doug Glenn: In the actual process itself, fixturing can be an issue, placement and configuration of the steam is an issue. I’m guessing part configuration can be challenging, the thick to thin cross-section. What are some of the difficult aspects of uphill quenching or difficult parts.

Greg Newton: One day, Lockheed calls me, and they had a sniper pod for the F16. They tread machined this 1,600-pound hand forging three times and were trying to go to a one piece, monolithic part. They had one more shot until they were going to lose the contract.

So, Don of Lockheed came to me asking if we could do it. They wanted to send me 1,600-pound hand forging and I said, “No, no, you need to rough machine this thing.” I asked how much the part weighed when they were done — “168 pounds.” That’s crazy!

I told them they needed to rough machine the part and then send to me. So, they rough machined it, and I get a part that is 1,200 pounds, but it was 6061. I told them we’ll give it our best shot. We did do multiple stabilizations on that part — I think we stabilized it three times, but it worked.

He was worried about getting this big hand forging back on the machine, because it did move a lot during uphill quenching. We did, in between post-heat treat, straighten it, uphill quench it, then straighten it; each run time it moved less, and, you know, you’re inducing stresses by straightening through the process as well. The third time, we uphill quenched it, checked if we needed to straighten it, and we didn’t. We shipped it, and they got through this. We saw another two or three more.

The challenge is what they think the process will do and what it’s capable of. I don’t think that would’ve worked for the 7000 series. You really want to get it within 150 thousandth to 100 thousands of control, because of the dispersoids they put in the super alloys, making it tougher to uphill clench.

Doug Glenn: What is your most interesting part that you have uphill quenched?

Greg Newton: The rotor grips for the old Hueys. When they re-engineered them and doubled the horsepower, they went from the two blades that you see on the mash that they could hear from 30 to 40 miles away. They increased the horsepower of the engines and went to four composite blades, but the rotor grip itself that they wrapped the carbon fibers around was a 2014 die forging.

But they had machining problems. They would make one pass over it and it would curl up about three quarters of an inch. So, Gene Williams came down from Bell Helicopter and spent a week with me. Bell doesn’t like anybody else’s data; they want to create their own data. So, he was out there with his camera, measuring and doing everything for a week. We got through the machining and they’re dead flat. Now, when I get rid of the stresses, I get rid of all the stresses: the compressive shell and the tensiles. So, they went back to these rotor grips and peened them, glass beaded them. This gave it a nice, even compressed shell without the negative effect of the tensiles in the core.

Now they are getting 8 to 10 times the life expectancy out of these parts, which makes sense on a fatigue curve, because you don’t know where you’re starting on that fatigue curve. Most of the curves go “whoop” [Editor’s Note: Greg demonstrates the exponential swoop of the graphic arc.], and you know you’re in that quarter and then you’re done. They store parts at 50% of their intended life for when they can’t get new parts and pray they get the new ones.

We get the problem parts, and that usually gets my foot in the door.

Doug Glenn: You mentioned earlier that if a company is developing a part or if they’re having an issue, it’s better for the client and for you guys that the sooner they talk to you the better. Most people don’t think the commercial heat treater or the processor can be that helpful, but with guys like you who have an expertise in the area, it’s probably well worth having an early phone call.

Greg Newton: No heat treater really loves to see final finished parts. It’s a violent process. We would rather have a little beat on that.

Ideal Parts and Benefits (30:45)

Doug Glenn: What type of parts should uphill quenching be performed? Can you give us a quick overview of the types of parts that you’ve uphill quenched?

Greg Newton: Any close-tolerance parts or any parts that are moving and machining out of tolerance are good for uphill quenching.

Doug Glenn: What benefit does uphill quenching have over similar or competitive processes?

Greg Newton: With straight thermal stress relieving, in which you’re just raising the temperature of the part, you have to be careful of losing your temper when doing it. To get a real stress relieve, you need to go up 600-700 degrees, and in doing that, you’re going to blow your temperatures right out in aluminum. So, you tend to use 25 degrees below zero for longer periods of time, and you might lower it. That tends to break the most highly strained lattices because you’ve lowered that yield strength a little bit and they’ll pop. That might be enough to get you through that part, the machining.

Is it going to move later in service? Probably. When heating up and cooling it down, especially in space; when you have an unstable part in space and it turns towards the sun gets 200-300 degrees (turns away from space in the vacuum), now you’re thermo cycling. It is a different type of stress relieving, and it can move those mirrors. Any slight movement in those mirrors, and you’ve lost your integrity.

They can figure out mathematically the coefficient of thermal expansion out in space, but warpage is difficult.

Radius of Industry (32:43)

Doug Glenn: You have an expertise in aluminum. What is the radius out of the city of industry that you’re getting clients from?

Greg Newton: We have received Israeli tank mirrors and German tank mirrors. We get parts shipped from the East Coast daily. Hamilton’s products, they attribute their position with the success of their uphill quenching on almost of all their cylindrical parts. They have a better product than anybody else, and they told me that they attribute much of that success the stability of their, their aluminum.

Doug Glenn: Is there anything that you thought of as we’re talking that you want to add into the conversation?

John Avalos: I’ll add that we’re the leaders in this process. There are a lot of similar processes Greg mentioned with boiling water. What that does is it forms the ice barrier around the part. By using steam blasting and uphill quenching, it removes that barrier — a barrier simply doesn’t form.

Greg Newton: Ice is a great insulator.

Doug Glenn: It reminds me of the vapor barrier when you’re trying to quench. It’s an insulator.

Greg Newton: Regarding the X-ray diffraction, having process control is important. You’re spending 10 times a normal heat treat, you’re throwing money in a problem, and there is nobody else that has any process control. To me, that’s playing Russian roulette with five in the chamber, not one. Your chances of success are slimmer. We want to know when something goes wrong. Why did it go wrong? Without any sort of can imagine, if we threw out EC and Rockwell out of our heat treatment and say, “Look, the charts look good! It must be good,” we’d have airplanes falling out of the sky daily.

Heat Treat Radio episode #124 with host Doug Glenn and guests Greg Newton and John Avalos

You have a very expensive problem. I would like to see a little more process control that everybody’s using. Nadcap is trying to tie that up as we speak.

Doug Glenn: Very good. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much I hope the listeners have enjoyed this as well. I think it’s a very interesting, somewhat unique process, and it’s good to talk with you two guys about it.

Greg Newton: I challenge any machine shop out there to send me their biggest nightmare in aluminum

Doug Glenn:  He just threw down the gauntlet: Send him your worst stuff, and he’ll see if he can fix it. Anyhow, thanks, Greg and John, thank you so much. I appreciate you guys.

About the Guest

Greg Newton
Owner, President, CEO
Newton Heat Treating

Greg Newton is the owner, president, and CEO of Newton Heat Treating. Founded by his father in 1968, Greg became president of Newton Heat Treating in 1995 and has decades of experience leading numerous projects in the heat treating industry. Greg has focused specifically on aluminum alloys — specializing in heat treating, uphill quenching, and other advanced thermal processes.

For more information: Contact Greg at gnewton@newtonheattreating.com

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