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Heat Treat Radio #78: Heat Treat Legend Suresh Jhawar

Heat Treat Today publisher and Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, meets another Heat Treat Legend, Suresh Jhawar. In this third installment of the Heat Treat Legend series, you’ll hear how Suresh became the president of G-M Enterprises, what he believes are the key skills of leaders, and what words of advice he has for budding leaders.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #78: Heat Treat Legend Suresh Jhawar

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG): Well, welcome everyone. This is Doug Glenn, once again, with Heat Treat Today speaking with the great honor of talking with another Heat Treat Legend. Today, we’re going to meet with Mr. Suresh Jhawar who was very instrumental in the founding of a vacuum heat treating company, and other experiences. I’ll let him tell some of that story. But, first off, Suresh, thank you so much, it’s really, really nice to have you with us.

Suresh Jhawar (SJ): Thank you and you are welcome.

DG: I want to have you spend a little bit of time telling people about some of your work background: Where did you start? How did you get in this industry? Where you went and what did you ended up doing?

SJ: I came to the United States in 1962 and attended Marquette University in Milwaukee. I graduated with Master of Science in mechanical engineering and an MBA in marketing. After that, in 1970, I started at Ipsen Industries as a senior project engineer for the vacuum furnaces. Within a year, I was promoted to the position of manager of engineering services. Soon after that, I was promoted to the director of heavy equipment division, handling large and complex projects.

Mr. Wesley Gable, who was a senior vice president of Ipsen Industries, inspired me and was really helpful in my career growth. He appreciated that I was hardworking and talented in performing well to challenges and did all that was possible for meeting difficult deadlines. When my car had a problem, he even loaned me his Cadillac to go back and forth to work.

So, that is, briefly, how I got into the vacuum furnace business.

Check out more episodes from the Heat Treat Legend series!

DG: So that was with Ipsen. You started with Ipsen in roughly what year?

SJ: 1970, and I left them in 1982.

DG: Where was Ipsen at that time?

SJ: Rockford, Illinois and they are still.

DG: So, where after Ipsen did you go?

SJ: Well, I was very happy there. We had almost 400 people in Rockford and there were about 300 in Germany. I was doing good. There were two vice presidents and a president and then after that, I was part of that management team. I was in the top five people at Ipsen and driving the company in cost savings, improving products, and customer relations. I was very happy.

But I was contacted and recruited by Abar, and I was not interested. Still, I thought, “Let’s go and see.” I had close to five interviews with them, up to the chairman of [indiscernible] and they offered me the job. I always wanted a position where I could run the entire operation. Ipsen was also considering that kind of a growth for me, but they said that it would take three to five years, and I was not patient at all. When the Abar position came, it doubled my compensation. So, I took that challenge, and I ran to Abar.

My boss [at Abar], John Henry, when he stepped into my office, I said, “John, you guys screwed me.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You know, I came from a nice company, and you have such a bad company here. But I’m very excited now because any idiot can improve upon this thing.”

DG: I’m sure you made him feel really good about that!

SJ: I was asked by John Henry, then the president of Abar, to write a justification. I was in Monterey in L.A., California, attending a management seminar on how to be an effective manager. They don’t let you get any phone calls, but there was an emergency and John Henry was calling. He said, “I met with Ipsen people. Can you write why it makes sense for Ipsen and Abar to join together?” In the night, (I had a nice room with a fireplace), I opened a wine bottle, and I wrote thirty pages in all caps, handwritten. The next morning, I overnighted that to John Henry and that is where it all started.

During the merger, John Henry — who was a Harvard MBA — was not happy where he was, so he was looking for jobs. I know he had resumes out, but he couldn’t find one. When this situation came, I was supposed to take over; when this opportunity [the merger] came, then I was the odd man.

DG: Ok, ok. You wrote the justification and then you got booted.

SJ: Yes. So, for a year and a half, I did a few projects. I worked in Germany, then I went with Sauder in Houston. Every weekend, I used to fly back and forth — I had an apartment. At Sauder, in less than a year, we sold three vacuum furnaces. But I was not happy. They were doing 5 million and losing a million dollars. It did not fit my objective.

Then, a customer, Continental Heat Treat, their president put me in contact with Keith Grier [founder of G-M Enterprises], so that’s how we met. In the beginning, I wanted $110,000/year; they offered me $55,000. Initially, I said no, and I went away. Later, when things did not go well at Sauder (or I didn’t like the company), Veena pushed me, and I took it. So, I came down and joined them and they said, “How much?” I said, “Your number.”

DG: I want to interject because I want to get a few names straight for people. You and I know who these people are, but others might not. First off you mentioned Keith Grier. Was Keith, at that time, one of the owners of GM? G-M existed at that time, yes?

SJ: Yes. And he had a partner, Mac McGuire.

DG: So, that’s the ‘G’ and the ‘M’ of G-M Enterprises. And you mentioned Veena, which you and I know who that is, you especially, but that’s your wife. You said Veena was pushing you to go ahead and take the job.

And you decided to take the position at GM?

SJ: Yes, as a partner with a 15% interest. Later, I bought McGuire out within a year. He was then out, so then Keith and I were the partners.

DG: What year was that?

SJ: 1987.

DG: So, in 1987, you entered in and basically started taking ownership, or took a portion of ownership, with GM.

SJ: You know, Keith was a nice guy and a good friend. He was very good with customers, and he was a good service tech. So, I helped in developing the product line. However, Keith wanted orders, and we could not make money, and we were kind of a break-even company. I was tired and so I went to Keith, and I said, “You buy me out.” He said, “No. I have a first right, you buy me out.” We talked and he wanted too much money which I could not afford. For six months, I dragged my feet, and I was losing interest. I went back and I said, “Okay, I accept.” In 2005, I took total ownership and changed the name from Greer Jhawar Industries to Jhawar Industries doing business as GM.

DG: Ah, okay! I had not heard that official business name.

That’s enough to let us know at least where you are. People should know right off that Suresh was the owner of G-M Enterprises; it is no longer owned by Suresh and is actually owned, now, by Nitrex.

I want to move on to the next question: In your years, as you were starting to either get involved with the industry or when you were in the industry, can you think of one or two people that had a significant impact on you, that maybe encouraged you in the industry?

SJ: Yes. One was Wesley Gable, who was a senior vice president [of Ipsen]; another the president of Ipsen, Les Senet, and then the next president (I’m trying to remember his name), he was very supportive of me — Lu Clay.

DG: And these guys all were just an encouragement to you in the sense of “Hey, get out there, and do it”, or how were they encouraging?

SJ: They liked the way I approached people, the business, customers, I was hardworking, meeting goals; so, I was number one choice for them.

DG: When you look back, Suresh, over your career, can you think, in your mind, what might have been the top two or three major accomplishments that you’ve done?

SJ: At Ipsen, I became, technically, the assistant to the president and traveled with him extensively to Poland and Armenia. Ten times I visited Poland in less than two years, every other month.

DG: Just curious, but why Poland? What was there?

SJ: The steel mill and annealing of silicon steel coils for the transformer steel. At Ipsen, we sold eight furnaces to Armco Steel in Middletown, Ohio. So, there was a large project of ten furnaces. Remember, at that time, Ipsen was doing only 12 or 13 million and that project was like a 6- or 7-million-dollar project.

The president and vice president were handling the commercial aspect, but before that, you have to convince the technical people that you have the right product and the right solution. That was my task. Ipsen was then successful in the booking the order for ten large car bottom furnaces. They were 84 inches wide x 45 inches high x 32 feet long. Furnaces were made in four sections, bolted. At the same time, Ipsen was also working on the license agreement with Elterma, which later became SECO/WARWICK. So, I was assisting the president and the vice president on the technical side of this license agreement and that was also signed.

I also brought Wessman Engineering from Kolkata, India, as a sales agent for Ipsen. Later, after I left, it became a joint venture and, eventually, Ipsen established a manufacturing base in India wholly owned by Ipsen. So, it was started with me by bringing Wessman Engineering into the position.

Mrs. Veena Jhawar, G-M Enterprises COO; Mr. Jean-François Cloutier, Nitrex CEO; Mr. Suresh Jhawar, G-M Enterprises President

Under my leadership with a period of three years, Abar grew and had a very, very good profit, and that’s when Abar and Ipsen came to a merger.

DG: That’s interesting. To me, there are a couple of good things there. One is one of your major accomplishments was that merger between Abar and Ipsen, which was great. But you should mention the success you’ve had with G-M Enterprises, as well; that’s got to be one of your top accomplishments.

SJ: In 1987, I joined G-M as a minority partner. At that time, G-M Enterprises was doing about 1.8 million annually and was a break-even company. In 2005, I acquired total ownership of G-M and brought in Veena Jhawar as director of supply chain and the oversee man of the operation while I was concentrating on developing customer base and innovating state of the art vacuum furnaces with superior designs and construction.

By 2018, G-M became a leading supplier to GE all over the world from Singapore to Japan and to Brazil. Pratt Whitney, Rolls Royce, Bodycote France, Precision Castparts, PCC, U.S. Airforce, and DLA, to name a few.

I was also instrumental in developing the MIM furnace, and proud to say that I developed a strong relationship with the founder and the chairman of INDO-MIM. At that time, they had only five people in their group; today they have over 3500 people.

DG: What was the name of the company again?

SJ: INDO-MIM, Inc.

Then, about five years back, they established the U.S. division because it became that customers in the U.S. wanted U.S.-made things. So, they took the space from Kelly Airforce base in San Antonio — I don’t remember how many square feet it was, maybe a 40,000 square foot building — and ordered two furnaces for their U.S. plant. By then we had already put thirteen furnaces in India. Last year, G-M got orders for three more furnaces, and before I left and when I was working as a consultant, sold two furnaces and then wrote a multi-year contract and on that basis, they bought three more. So, they have well over twenty furnaces in India and about five furnaces in the U.S. These are good-sized. They are 36 x 30 x 84 inches long. In the MIM industry, I believe, these are the biggest furnaces.

Now, INDO-MIM is the world’s largest supplier. Before, Advanced Forming Technology – AFT in Denver, CO — that’s the company with whom Indo-MIM signed a license agreement/joint venture — and then they separated.

DG: I want to talk about G-M just a little bit and speculate a little bit. G-M Enterprises, obviously, is one of your great accomplishments, if you ask me. What do you think it was that made G-M as successful as it was? If you were to look back on it now, what do you think were the keys to making it so successful?

SJ: During my career, I learned that in order to have a satisfied customer base, it is very important to have a talented, dedicated and happy staff. What I believe is “happy, happy, happy”: happy employee, happy customer, happy bottom line. In any business, it’s very important to listen to the customers’ requirements rather than just throw what you have in your basket and offer innovative solutions and then listen. It’s very important that customers feel that they were a critical part of the solution.

"The other very important aspect of business is after-market customer service. G-M built up a high level of customer support in family business." -Suresh Jhawar

The other very important aspect of business is after-market customer service. G-M built up a high level of customer support in family business. In other places, if a customer has a warranty problem or has a problem, they call the home office and the first thing that people say is give [indiscernible]. But listen, at General Electric and Pratt Whitney, these guys cannot [indiscernible]. So, we used to jump on a plane, and we’d go and take care as GM. After solving the problem, we’d say, “Hey, customer, you screwed this thing up. You’ve got to pay us.” I would say, half the customers would pay the full charge, 25-30% of the people would spread the cost, and 10-15% would say, “screw you.” So, it was a good average. That was one of the key defenses between us and other furnace suppliers.

DG: So, your point is, you just immediately responded. Let’s get out and fix the problem, then we can talk about terms later.

SJ: Just imagine: For $5000, half a million-dollar or three-quarter million-dollar equipment is down. It’s not good! So, you go and take care. That’s how you develop a good customer loyalty — they can depend on you.

I’m pretty sure that we had the highest bottom-line in the industry. We had the highest at Ipsen when I was there, it was the highest at Abar, and then at GM.

DG: Well, I’m starting to see a trend here, Suresh. Every place you’ve gone, if you weren’t making a happy bottom-line, it was an issue. You like the happy bottom-line.

SJ: I say, “Happy, happy, happy.” Then, I had a song. In Muslim religion, they raise their hand up, they say, “Allahu Akbar.” I used to say, “Bye GM, bye GM, bye GM.”

"What I believe is “happy, happy, happy”: happy employee, happy customer, happy bottom line. In any business, it’s very important to listen to the customers’ requirements rather than just throw what you have in your basket and offer innovative solutions and then listen. It’s very important that customers feel that they were a critical part of the solution." -Suresh Jhawar

DG: ~chuckles~ That’s a good mantra, right there! How many years would you say you’ve been in the industry?

SJ: Over 50.

DG: So, looking back on your 50 years, given your experience, what is the top one or two lessons that you’ve learned? What do you wish you would’ve known when you first started that you know now?

SJ: What I know now, that’s what we practice: respecting employees and rewarding them for their contribution is the fundamental recipe for success. We always treated our employees as a family member and gave them due respect for their contribution. With the right and dedicated employees, it’s very easy to provide quality and timely support to customers. Customers felt very comfortable when they call, even after 10 years, that they were talking to the same highly loyal staff, and business continuity is very important. Customers have said that when they called our competition, every two or three years, they were talking to new people. So, that was very important.

DG: So, maintaining good people basically is the point here, right? For consistency. It certainly helps with efficiency internally, but on the customer facing thing, it’s very good.

SJ: Very comfortable, yes. I used to go late in the morning, 10 o’clock or so, to work and then I’d stay until 6 or 7 o'clock. Many days, the guy in Parts [Department] was still working! And you didn’t have to ask them.

DG: Well, you know, if they find a good work environment, they’re happy to stay and they’re happy to work, which is good.

Let me ask you this question: Were there any disciplines in your life, things that you did/developed, (again, this doesn’t have to be work-related, so much, although it probably has a positive impact on your work), that were very helpful to you in advancing your career, your life, your happiness?

SJ: One was to meet deadlines. We used to have production control meetings. I was given a task, by the president, to design and manufacture a tube and shell heat exchanger. You could buy them outside, but he was bent on making in-house, and so I was given the project. And, like today being Wednesday, at 8 o’clock we were having a production control meeting and I did not do anything, and all the drawings were due tomorrow. In the production control meeting, people were laughing at me because they were looking at throwing darts at me. In a way, they were saying, in a calm voice, “Son of bitch, he puts pressure on us, but he doesn’t do his own job.”

Do you know, I never went home? And the next day I was supposed to go on a trip — I had a 10 o’clock flight from O’Hare. I worked through the night and at 7:30am when the engineering crew came in, I gave them all the drawings, bill of material, left for O’Hare, and took a nap on the plane.

What I’m trying to convey is: Meeting deadlines and commitment, to me, is always number one. No excuses.

DG: Get it done and get it done when you say you’re going to get it done.

SJ: That helps you to expect from other people, when they see you, that you do that, so they follow.

DG: They know you’ve got a platform to stand on when you’re talking to them about doing the same thing.

So, you just talked about a very interesting situation where you worked through the night to get something done. This kind of sets up for the next question, and that is: How did you, Suresh Jhawar, handle the work/life balance? Or was there no work/life balance, was it all work?

SJ: You know, it was difficult when I was at Abar, because I took a big responsibility, and I was traveling internationally quite often. So, I missed a lot of family functions of children in their school and then, finally, when Andy [son of Suresh] was getting an award at his high school, I was coming from Europe, either Poland or some place, and the plane comes to Chicago, and I have to change. And the flight was late, so I missed my connection. Now it became difficult as to how to get to Philadelphia to attend that awards ceremony for my son. I called Veena and said, “You guys go ahead. I don’t know whether I’ll make it or not.” I went from one airline to another. I got on a plane, reached Philadelphia airport at the time when the program started, but I was at the school at the right moment when Andy’s name was called. I was there!

DG: That is great! Well, you do what you can, you know? You’ve got to get there. And you’ve got what, two children, correct?

SJ: Yes, Andy and Sheri.

DG: Looking back on your career, what was one of the most memorable things that happened to you?

SJ: At GM, it was easy, because Veena and I worked together. It was pretty balanced; we were both colleagues and had the same goals. It was much easier compared to other places.

Coming back to that: I was an average student in India, a B student, or so. My parents didn’t want me to leave India. But I was interested. I researched UK, Germany and U.S. I found that in the UK and Germany, it would take me 4-5 years to get a Bachelor or Science degree in Engineering. The cost was half of the USA. But, in the U.S., I could do it in 2 years, and the reason was because I already had a Bachelor of Science degree from India, so they were giving me advanced credit, so I started as a sophomore. I did my undergraduate in 2 years here and the 2-year cost was the same as 4 or 5 years in UK than U.S. I used to go the U.S. library, do this. My parents didn’t support me, but I went and got my passport, got visa and I was determined. I landed in 1962 to the U.S..

That is the most memorable, yes.

DG: Coming to the U.S. And achieving it even though your parents weren’t necessarily fully on board.

SJ: The other thing to highlight is: Before marriage, when Veena and I met many times, Veena had rejected over 20 people. She even told me no. But she said, “You have to tell it to my father because I cannot say that I’m rejecting you, because they are tired of you.” She was surprised when I said, “Okay, I will.” And the other boys, they would not leave her. So, that brought us together.

By the way, in front of my father, I was a very shy guy. I didn’t speak much, just, “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” She thought, up to marriage, “What kind of a guy is this? So timid!” Anyway, then we got on a plane, and I ordered two scotch, and she saw me entirely different! That was another highlight.

DG: Last question for you, Suresh: If you were to give some of the young people in the industry a little advice, what would you give them? I can say this as a fellow ‘old-timer’ in the industry, what would you say to them?

SJ: The most important thing is to treat your employees like you treat yourself. When I worked at GM, out of any of the other places, I didn’t work as being “the boss” or on a high platform; I worked shoulder to shoulder with them. That gained their trust. I trusted them, they trusted me. That is very important. Business cannot succeed unless you have people — the right people and dedicated people.

DG: Well, Suresh, thank you very much. I appreciate the time that you spent with us. I know, personally, you’re one of the guys who is always very positive and very encouraging to me. . . . Even though you insulted me a lot! ~chuckle~

SJ: That was in a friendly manner! I don’t stop anybody on the street and insult them. Only between friends. ~chuckle~

DG: On a more serious note, I have appreciated your encouragement over the years. You’re a good friend and a person who has always been encouraging. I appreciate that.

Thanks for your time, today.

Doug Glenn Publisher Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio .

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See Fives North American Combustion, Inc. listing on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #78: Heat Treat Legend Suresh Jhawar Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #77: Algorithmic Combustion Tuning With Justin Dzik and Ben Witoff at Fives

July 14, 2022 / BURNERS & COMBUSTION SYSTEMS TECHNICAL CONTENT, FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, host and Heat Treat Today publisher Doug Glenn learns about a never-before-seen combustion system tuning technology from Justin Dzik, manager of business development, and Ben Witoff, manager of data engineering, at Fives North American Combustion, Inc. Hear from the experts themselves how this system will save time, money, and personnel and can be adapted to virtually any furnace system.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #77: Algorithmic Combustion Tuning With Justin Dzik and Ben Witoff at Fives

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG): This is kind of a new technology that I haven’t seen before in the market. We’re going to be talking about combustion system tuning. We have here with us today Justin Dzik from North American Combustion and also Ben Witoff. Justin is the manager of business development there in Cleveland and Ben is the manager of data engineering. We’re going to hit on, I think, what is a pretty interesting new product that you guys are developing. When I first saw and heard about it, I thought, “ I have not heard of anything like this before.” I think our listeners and viewers will find it of interest.

The name of the product is called CertiFire™. Before we get too far into it, Justin, if you don’t mind, can you give us just a brief background about you? And why don’t we have you, if you don’t mind, just give us a thirty second blurb on Fives North American Combustion, as well, please.

Justin Dzik (JD): As Doug already said, I’m the manager of business development and I’ve worked at Fives for 15 years now in various different roles, primarily focused on the forging and heat treat markets doing uniformity tests, and that’s really why this product is so close to us.

Fives North American is a company that has been around for about one hundred years; it’s located in Cleveland, Ohio. We produce combustion equipment, but we also do turnkey systems, we do furnaces, direct-fired furnaces for the forge heat treat but we also supply combustion equipment for pretty much every industry that needs heat, which is quite a bit.

DG: I would like to mention also for those of you who are old-timers, somewhat like me, Fives North American Combustion should be recognizable. The old company name was just North American Manufacturing. They are in the Taj Mahal on Grant Street just south of downtown Cleveland.

Ben, how about you? If you don’t mind, give us a quick blurb about yourself and your role there.

Ben Witoff (BW): I’ve been here just about 10 years; my 10-year anniversary is going to be next year. I’ve worked in various R&D roles since I’ve been here. I started as a burner designer, worked with FEA CFD modeling, moved into thermal processing engineering, and then, just a few years ago, I started the data engineering department here so that we could try to augment our combustion and industrial equipment with sensors, with IoT, with data, with smart engineering, and just to try to take a step further.

DG: Industry 4.0, IoT and all of that stuff is very, very interesting. That’s what caught my attention on this thing.

Justin, without going into any great detail, if someone only watched the first two minutes of this podcast, from a 30,000-foot view, what is CertiFire™, and why should people care about it?

JD: The CertiFire™ is, as you already stated, an automated tuning device for temperature uniformity certifications. I think pretty much everybody that’s going to watch this podcast is probably going to know that they can be extremely time consuming to do, they take a lot of time and a lot of intelligence to actually tune the process. This device takes all of that and does it all itself. It does all the automated burner tuning, all the valve adjustments, it locks it all in and tunes it for whatever class uniformity you need.

DG: I did want to hit on that, too, because we’re talking about trying to tune the combustion system on a furnace so that that furnace is running, first off, optimally (not wasting energy), but also, we’re talking about trying to make that system uniform, trying to make the work zone uniform, inside that furnace. So, again, most people will already now this, but it’s always good to hit on some basics here, because there may be people listening that don’t know some of the basics: why is this work zone uniformity, the area inside the furnace, why is it important that it be uniform? And then, if you can, maybe hit on what we mean when we say, “furnace classifications.”

JD: Obviously, it’s important because the parts that are going into these furnaces can be used for a variety of applications, like everybody knows, aerospace being a primary part class that’s going in. Because of that, and the metallurgy required, everything needs to be within a certain temperature band in order to get the same metallurgical properties, after they forge it, or heat treat it or whatever. So, it’s extremely important to make that work zone as tight as possible and as consistent as possible, and as we can all imagine, having a work zone about 3 or 4 feet away from essentially a live fire coming out of a burner, is extremely difficult.

As you said already, there are classifications, there are different codes that govern the work zone classifications like AMS2750 Revision F is the most recent one, Rolls Royce has their own, and pretty much all of the aerospace suppliers have theirs. So, the classifications really govern how tight the uniformity band has to be in that work zone.

There is class 1 which is basically ±5 degrees Fahrenheit anywhere in that work zone and it goes all the way up to class 6 which is ±50 degrees, so much more lenient. Obviously, class 1 is the hardest, probably all heat treat stuff; class 6 is probably some heavy forgings.

DG: As we move up the furnace classifications, as we move up from going ±5 to ±50, the lower classifications are where it’s really critical that any type of heating source, whether it be electric heating elements or combustion, be well tuned because you want the whole entire work zone to be uniform.

But we’re talking specifically about combustion tuning. Justin, I’ll address this with you and then Ben- I’m coming to you with the next question: How have combustion systems typically been tuned in the past — in fact, I would say probably 99% of them are still tuned even now — and what are some of the major issues that we run into in the way we’re currently doing it?

JD: Obviously, there is a variety of complexity of systems out there. There are furnaces still in operation that we put in in 1960. The number of valves they have on there, they’re probably more manual valves so there’s a lot of manual tweaking of things going on right at the burner. The more advanced systems out today have automated valves, but you’re still doing manual adjustments in a PLC, probably, that you’re trying to tweak. Everybody knows, and I think Ben really likes to use this statement: it’s a game of whack-a-mole. You adjust a burner here and it goes out of compliance over here and so you run over there. I’ve been on hundreds of surveys where I’m running around the furnace trying to watch my temperature map that I have in my hand. It can get very tedious, and it takes a lot of know-how and a lot of experience, I believe, to tune these furnaces.

DG: So, there is, I believe to a certain extent, an art to it now, very much dependent, I’m guessing, on your specific furnace, your specific burner, your specific burner configuration, and what mode of combustion you’re using, whether it’s pulse fire or whatever, right? All of those things are “the art of combustion.” It kind of takes us back to that black art that heat treaters are trying to avoid, where you’ve got to figure it out, each one individually. CertiFire™ is basically going to help us eliminate that.

Ben, if you don’t mind, how does CertiFire™ work, why is it better, and what kind of results do you think we can get in the sense of amount of time spent trying to tune a system and uniformity?

BW: As Justin mentioned, I love using that term “whack-a-mole.” I think it’s a great way to describe it, it’s a great way for people to understand. You bop down one of those thermocouples, you get it into the right temperature, and then the next one popped right back out. And the reason that happens is because these furnaces are nonlinear systems.

When you look at the inputs and you look at the outputs and you try to model it just from a purely physics or mathematical perspective, it’s not something that can be tuned linearly, you can’t just adjust a valve and then adjust the second valve and expect all of the adjustments from the first one to carry over. You’re constantly throwing one thing out of whack when you bring another thing in.

You also touched on this with your other question: there are so many other factors that affect the uniformity of the furnace. If we built five identical furnaces in our factory and got all of the burners set up identical and we shipped then out to five different locations, they’d all be different — completely different — because it’s the humidity on that day, it’s the temperature, it’s the elevation that it’s installed, it’s whether or not the facility is indoors or if they have their garage doors up- there are so many different factors that affect it. It’s the humidity when we mix the refractory on that day that affects it.

So, you can’t just tune it, forget about it, and ship it off. It needs to be done on site. And today, it’s kind of that “art” — it’s someone that is highly trained, they have years of experience to do it. They’re the “furnace whisperer,” they can figure out exactly how they get those systems into tune.

So, what we did is we took a step back and we said- how can we try to approach this mathematically? The first thing that we identified is we cannot be adjusting one at a time. You don’t adjust burner one and then look at the temperature readout and then adjust burner two. We can’t do it that way. So, we said we have to figure out how we can model that 3D space, those inputs and those outputs and that relationship between them, and that’s the fundamental nature of what the CertiFire™ does.

Photo Credit: Fives North American Combustion, Inc

We use this phrase “response matrix” and this is the way that we’ve created this virtual map of the furnace. It maps all the inputs — those burners, those heat sources — to all the outputs — those thermocouples in the work zone, that temperature measurement point.

And what we do is we go through this training phase for every furnace where we modulate our burners, we change the firing rate in a known way for all of the burners and then we measure exactly how those temperatures of those thermocouples in the work zone change. And the way that they change, the speed at which they react, the amount of time it takes to heat up and cool down, and the exact 3-D map of where those thermocouples are and how they react to each burner and where those burners are, is what this response matrix is.

The beautiful thing about the math behind it is you can solve the equation forwards or backwards. So, it’s easy to modulate a burner; it’s an independent variable. You can tell exactly where to be. You don’t know where the temperature is going to be, but you can measure it once you modulate that burner. So, that’s our equation.

We build the forward equation, and the beauty of CertiFire™ is we just flip it backwards. We solve it the other way. We say, “Where are all our thermocouples today? What’s our survey temperature?” All right, well, this one is 5 degrees hot, this one is 20 degrees cold, so you have all of your ΔT’s and then you say- well this if is my array of delta T’s, then divide by their response matrix. What’s my array of delta burner adjustments?

So, it solves for all the burners simultaneously, it takes all the adjustments into account, it gets rid of that whole whack-a-mole game, and it tells you burners 1 through however many you have need to be adjusted x% up, x% down, you do the adjustments, it looks at it and says, “Is it good enough?”, and if not, make another adjustment.

DG: Very interesting. So, this is all done through algorithms and things of that sort, I assume, the “secret sauce.”

BW: Right, exactly. It’s some fairly simple math but it’s this matrix math where we’re trying to model multiple inputs and multiple outputs, and we’re trying to map N-inputs to M-outputs. It’s not necessarily linear still but we’re making these linear approximations for a nonlinear system.

DG: I’m going to create a fictitious persona here and ask you about the capabilities: I’m a guy who owns a furnace that is a class 4, class 5, class 6 — let’s say it’s not super-precise as far as temperature uniformity (±15 or upwards). It’s an older system. I’ve got old burners on there, and I’ve got old valving on there. In order to use the CertiFire™, do I need to update those burners and/or valving so that it can be precisely tuned, or does the CertiFire™ work on any type of current combustion system?

BW: I guess I would say yes and no. I’ll get into the details on that because it can be kind of a confusing or irritating answer. I’ll start with yes, because the fundamental algorithm really doesn’t care that it’s a furnace at all, it doesn’t care that it’s a cube, it doesn’t care that it’s X number of burners or whatever dimension. The fundamental algorithm is simply that you map inputs to outputs, and they can be any different size, they don’t have to be the same size, and then it allows you to solve it backwards. The fundamental algorithm, the piece that is the heart of the CertiFire™ can absolutely work on that furnace.

The reason I said no is because the first piece of technology we’re trying to tackle with the CertiFire™ is a more advance PLC controlled system. The way that we do tuning today is we use actuated bleed valves per burner on our furnaces so that we can make that fine tuning automatically through a PLC adjustment. Because the PLC can control those actuated bleed valves per burner, it’s really simple for a device to just simply plug in with the data cable and then immediately take over the furnace and make these adjustments automatically at the push of a button.

That’s the first tier of furnace technology that we’re trying to tackle, that we’re trying to release a product for. What we’re working on after that tier, our lower tiers, are furnaces where customers are wanting to retrofit to a bleed valve system and then, finally, after that, are customers who are unwilling or don’t want to upgrade to that retrofit system.

Because no matter how you make that adjustment, the easiest way is a bleed valve if you already have it. But no matter how you make it, if it’s eliminating orifice valve and it’s a technician with a screwdriver in his hand, it’s the same algorithm. The only difference would be the CertiFire™ HMI may print out a sheet of paper that the guy can walk around the furnace with or he’s carrying an iPad and it says “Burner 1, quarter turn right, burner 2, eighth turn left.” He can make them one after the other in series because the solution itself is still a parallel solution.

DG: Obviously, it’s going to take more time and there’s more manual interaction there with that latter example you were giving.

BW: Right. But it’s certainly not more manual than they would tune it without the CertiFire™. It doesn’t take that furnace whisperer technician to get that done — anyone can use that sheet and make the adjustments that it tells them to make.

DG: It sounds like, with yours, even if you’re doing the adjustments manually, let’s say, in your latter example, you’re going to go out and you’re going to make an adjustment to all 12 burners on your furnace and come back and see how that goes. Whereas if you’re the whack-a-mole furnace whisperer, he’s going to go out, adjust one, come back, see how it goes, go back out and adjust another one. So, that makes some sense.

How about installation of this thing? You mentioned data cables and things of that sort. How complicated is this thing to install, and how much time to install?

BW: Starting with the first tier of customer that we’re trying to talk about here, if there is an existing furnace, if it has the panel that we built for this customer, if they have these bleed valves with actuators on them talking to the PLC today. If we were to walk into that facility, we would have a box that is literally plug-and-play. It needs power, it needs data, and then your HMI has a green “go” button on it. It’s something that we would preconfigure because we’d understand the tags inside of the PLC and how to communicate to all of the valves. It would actually be that simple.

If it was built by somebody else or it was an older panel or we didn’t know how the PLC worked, it would probably take some time for us to understand it from the controls perspective so that we could get all of the tags coded properly, but that’s not anytime where the customer is not running. They’re still running, we’re just in the background reading some PLC information.

And then, finally, if this is a customer that wants to add that equipment, if they’re looking to upgrade if their equipment is older, or maybe their class 5 today but they really want to be class 3 or maybe even class 2, we would probably suggest, with or without CertiFire™, to upgrade to those bleed valves per burner. We think we can get better control with that and in that case, maybe the customer has to shut down the furnace for a week while we do the installation and then once it’s installed again, it would really be that simple as a plug-and-play device with a data cable.

DG: Justin, I’ve got a question for you, now: I can imagine that some of the viewers/listeners are wondering, “Yes, I’ve got a combustion furnace I’d like to do this. Does it make sense for my furnace?” Are there any systems out there that you can think of, any furnaces with combustion, where the CertiFire™ would not make sense? Are there any applications or anything along that line?

JD: Honestly, I think that if you need to comply or certify your furnace to any uniformity standard, The CertiFire™ could definitely help. As Ben stated, there are different tiers of the product and how it would actually be from the customer experience. From a totally automated state to one where CertiFire™ is like the assistant to the person performing the tuning. But there are no configurations — step fire, pulse fire, excess air modulated, everything under the sun — the CertiFire™ can help solve those problems for them.

DG: So, I assume the aluminum industry, steel industry, heat treat industry, generally speaking, have no problem firing into radiant tubes?

JD: So, obviously, we’re at the beginning of the launch of this product, so where we’ve focused on is direct-fired heat treat furnaces and torch furnaces, and we’re looking to branch out into other things. We’ve even had discussions internally of using this on resistive heaters for electric heaters because we know “the green wave” is coming. The product itself has been, I think, stated pretty well.

The algorithm has no idea that it’s even a furnace. It could be applied to pretty much everything. I think this is going to be one of those products where we made it for this — we do this all the time with our burners — and then we find all these other ancillary uses for it because it’s such a revolutionary kind of idea.

DG: As you were talking there, I was thinking to myself, “Yes, you know, if you designed it so far for direct-fired, to a certain extent, radiant tube applications might add a little more complexity to it because you’ve got heat transfer rates through a tube, but, I suppose, still, it’s going to do the job because it doesn’t know.

JD: Yes. There is a thermocouple having a response and then there is this burner input. The way the heat transfer happens is going to change, but you’re going to have to modulate the radiant tube to get where you’re going to need to go.

DG: So, it’s “heat source agnostic,” we’ll call it.

Does this system have any type of reporting? I guess you did say, Ben, that after you do the first test and establish the response matrix, there is some sort of a report, I assume, when you want to tune it, but what is the reporting, what’s it look like? What are people going to get from this thing? And I guess I want to ask about the platform that it’s on, I guess it’s just PLC-based, right?

BW: The tuning is done through the PLC because it’s communicating with those actuated bleed belts. The actual box itself is essentially a computer, so it’s running our own custom code and it’s executing that to communicate with the PLC. We’ve tried very hard to make it PLC agnostic so it can communicate with the most common things we see in the market today. It can communicate over common protocols like Modbus, it can communicate with Rockwell’s EtherNet/IP or Viessmann F7. So, that is essentially just a computer — it’s a Linux box that can talk all of those languages at once, so it can just plug-and-play with the PLC.

The reporting we’ve tried to make look similar to what people are used to. People are used to looking at chart recorders to see temperature, so we have essentially a more advanced display of live data, chart recording for temperatures for valves that you can see exactly where it is with historical data easily available at a click and drag so you can see where it was and where it is today.

As far as an output of the report, we’ve also tried to make that look, as much as possible, like what people are used to seeing. With the AMS certification, there are guidelines about what data needs to be stored, what needs to be reported, and while we’re not doing the certification, that type of time-stamped temperature by furnace ID, by who ran the test — all of that information is generated in these reports every time that you do this response matrix as training creation, and then every time that you solve that and do this tuning of the combustion system.

DG: I can see some people wondering about this: Is it Cloud-based at all or is it all on site?

BW: It’s entirely on site. There is certainly the option. I know some customers (although it’s rare but it is growing today) want their information to be more accessible than it is today. But if a customer doesn’t want that, if they want everything restricted to plant, if they want it restricted off of the plant network and even adjust on the box itself. We can do that as well. Today, we don’t have Cloud connectivity built into the base box. We wanted to make it simple, we wanted to make it easy for customer compliance. It’s an option, it’s something we can do, but it’s not something we wanted to pursue in the first release.

DG: You’re avoiding a lot of potential internet cybersecurity issues with that.

I have a forward-looking question for you. By the way, I should mention, I’m sure by the time people listen to this, the AISTech Show will be over because it’s scheduled for next week (we’re recording this on the 10^th of May and it’s scheduled for the 17–19^th). I know that you guys are giving a presentation there so perhaps we can reference that on this podcast and give a link for it. . . CLICK HERE.

I know you’re just launching it. Actually, when did you launch it? Has it been weeks, months, or a year?

JD: I think it’s been about a month.

DG: So, it’s relatively new. As I say, we’re doing this on May 10^th, so let’s say, April or late March you launched this thing. Have you put any thought into the future? Do you have dreams and hopes, and, if so, what might they be?

JD: Absolutely, we have some plans. Some immediate plans are we’ve talked about the tiers and how we’re going to keep pushing forward with making this a product that is for all furnaces for all direct-fired furnaces, to start, with manual valves and automated valves, so we’ll get to the tier 1, 2, 3.

Then, a big trend we’re hearing as we’re talking to customers is more gear towards predictive maintenance. Obviously, we need to tune the furnace, but the customers don’t want you tuning the furnace every time they need to certify because that calls into question their parts from the last quarter or half year that they’ve been doing.

So really you tune once and then you probably go a year; hopefully on our furnaces we go many, many years without drifting. But the box can also be used for some predictive maintenance. Use the thermocouple inputs that we have to measure the box shell temperature, see if the fiber is degrading, see if you’re up for a realign, see if your flows need to be readjusted. So, there’s a more predictive nature to the retuning process rather than a reactive nature. That’s really going to be the next step.

Then we’ll look forward to see if there’s other type of heating — like you said, radiant tubes or resistive heating. I think that’s a little bit further in the future, mostly because we’re, obviously, a gas combustion company so we’re focusing on what we know first and then we’ll build out from there.

DG: So, you’re saying some of that stuff that you’re hoping for the future is not really even combustion related, you’re going to be doing condition of the furnace.

JD: Right, like a furnace health monitor. I think everybody wants to know they’re running that furnace pretty hard (especially in a forge environment, you’re beating the hearth pretty good). To have a one-month out warning, “Hey, you might need to shut down, rather than a catastrophic failure.” We’ve gone into furnaces too much where there’s been a hole in the roof, because the fiber fell out or they just didn’t know about it. We’re trying to help customers out before something like that happens.

DG: Right now, I know almost all of the burners (the stuff you’re currently doing) are all hardwired, correct? Is there any thought about making them wireless? Is that even a reasonable thing to think about or not?

JD: From the burner standpoint or from the CertiFire™ standpoint?

DG: From the CertiFire™, in the sense of controlling and getting the data in and out. Maybe it’s a silly question, but I was just wondering. Right now, you’re just hardwiring all this stuff.

JD: That’s correct. Generally, that’s currently the way furnaces are configured. They’re all hardwired to a local PLC. Ben could probably speak a little bit more about it. I think we’ve talked about ways to wirelessly link devices more as diagnostic devices, not controlling wirelessly. You can’t really control them wirelessly because of the response time, but diagnostic components could be wireless.

BW: One of the first things that we did when the CertiFire™ was in prerelease was we were designing this box to essentially plug and be installed on that furnace. Then we took a step back and we tried to consider who’s going to be using this, how do they want to use it, what do their facilities look like?

A lot of people have multiple furnaces — maybe as little as two but sometimes upwards of twenty furnaces. Maybe you don’t want to install it permanently, maybe you want to be able to move it around, or maybe if you have a plantwide network and intranet there, you can plug this in your control tower and you can sit in an airconditioned room with one CertiFire™ and talk to every furnace at once.

That’s something that we put into that release from a month ago so the release CertiFire™ can communicate with all of your plant network at once (if you have the plant network), or just with that one furnace if you want to plug it into that one isolated furnace. We should be able to essentially it fields wirelessly you can communicate to whatever is on the network at once.

JD: Like you said already, we’ll be AISTech next week, (it will probably lapse this podcast). Then, I’ll also be presenting at the IFC (International ForgeMasters Congress) in June and with future engagements at Furnaces North America. This is our roadshow this year.

DG: You’ve got a lot to talk about! Like I said, I don’t know about you, and I know the answer to this question but I’m going to ask it anyhow.

BW: Nothing that I’ve seen.

DG: I don’t think anybody else has anything like this, as best I know. If they did, they’d be foolish to say so. But I haven’t seen it. I don’t know. Maybe they are and I’m going to catch grief for saying that.

It’s an interesting new product and I wish you guys well. I hope you’re very successful.

Good to have you with us, guys. Thanks very much for joining us.

JD/BW: Thanks for having us.

For more information, contact:

Website: Fives North American Combustion, Inc.

Contact Justin: justin.dzik@fivesgroup.com

Doug Glenn Publisher Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio .

.

See Fives North American Combustion, Inc. listing on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #77: Algorithmic Combustion Tuning With Justin Dzik and Ben Witoff at Fives Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #76: Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today – Mill Processes and Production, Part 1

June 23, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, and several other Heat Treat Today team members sit down with long-time industry expert Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor^®, to talk about simplified mill practices and processes as they relate to aluminum and steel. Enjoy this second informative Lunch & Learn with the Heat Treat Today team.

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

HTT · Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today – Mill Processes and Production, Part 1

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Dan Herring (DH): It’s my pleasure to be here and what I’m going to attempt to do in about the next 30-40 minutes is take about 3 or 4,000 pages of literature and condense it down into some simple English and some common sense, if you will.

We will talk about mill practices, production methods, and what I like to call the forms produced. We might call this whole thing “simplified” for lack of a better terminology, if that makes sense. I’ve selected two very common materials to talk about. The first one is aluminum and the second is steel. But I’m going to disguise that a little bit and talk a little about aluminum and iron. Just to recall, maybe our high school chemistry, aluminum (or aluminium as it’s called by the rest of the world), has chemical symbol Al and iron has chemical symbol Fe. You might wonder how we got Fe from iron: it’s from the Latin word ferrum. Aluminium is another story which I’ll leave for another time, but it is quite interesting.

If we’re going to talk about aluminum and if we’re going to talk about iron, why isn’t steel an element? That’s a question I get very often. Steel is actually an alloy. That’s a combination of different elements. The way I like to think about steel is it’s iron and manganese and carbon and some other alloying elements put in that make specific types of steel that are used for specific applications and application purposes.

Watch or listen to the first episode in this series

The other common question I get is you’ve heard of terms in history like “the stone age” where all the tools and, by the way, the weapons were made of stone. Similarly, the stone age gave way to something called “the bronze age.” That’s where an alloy of copper and tin came on. Again, it made better tools and, by the way, better weapons than the stone tools were. Then, later, you probably heard that there was something called “the iron age”, and we all commonly have heard these terms, but why haven’t we heard about “the steel age”? That’s a common question. What is the steel age? Why isn’t it an age, if you will? That’s because we came up with a very fancy term: The Industrial Revolution, where we started to use steel as an engineering material. I don’t want to get too off subject here, but thought I’d mention that.

So, we begin with raw material, and we call that within the industry an ore. Now, most raw material is in the form of ore or minerals that are found in nature, and they’re typically the element of interest (aluminum or iron in this case) combined with possibly some undesirable elements. The ore that we get from the raw material that we get from the earth has to be refined to make it into a metal. And there are certain raw materials (gold is a good example), that are found in its pure state. I which I could have found more of it in my career, then I wouldn’t be talking to you, but that’s a different story! The idea here is the fact that most ores come in the form of, or most minerals are found in nature and have to be refined.

[blockquote author="Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor^®" style="1"][The] chemical bond between aluminum and oxygen is very strong. As a result of that, we need a lot of energy to break that bond apart, to produce aluminum the metal and oxygen the byproduct. A lot of energy is required for that[/blockquote]

The principal ore containing aluminum is something we call bauxite. Bauxite is aluminum oxide, chemical symbol Al203. The way I like to think of bauxite is bauxite is dirt. We can put a dress on it, but it’s still dirt at the end of the day. It’s a special type of dirt. It’s a dirt that has 40-60% aluminum oxide in it. And there are certain areas in the world where bauxite is more common than others. Interestingly enough, Australia is a tremendous source of bauxite as is Africa. That’s why you find the majority of bauxite mines in either Australia or Africa or other places in the world.

When you get into iron, there are two principal ores — there are hematite and magnetite. They are iron oxides and they’re obviously rich in iron.

But to begin, let’s deal with aluminum and what the mill has to do, or what the aluminum manufacturing process really is. We start off, as I said, with dirt, with the raw ore. We then get fancy, and we crush it into a very coarse powder and then after we’ve crushed it, we want to refine it — we want to take and remove some of the impurities. So, we mix it with a little of what we call caustic soda, which is sodium hydroxide, and lime, which is calcium oxide or calcium carbonate, and we use that refining method to purify the raw ore. What we wind up with, interestingly enough, is a very fine white powder which is called alumina or aluminum oxide.

We start out the manufacturing process with a raw material that is a very, very fine powder that is almost all (principally 99%) aluminum oxide. We take it and we put it into a furnace, and we heat it. We do that process with electricity because we’re using carbon anodes, if you will, placed into the bath that we pass current through to melt the aluminum. The process therefore is extremely energy intensive. That’s why you find aluminum production plants in areas like the Tennessee valley, where we have a lot of hydroelectric power. You find them in Iceland, where you have a lot of geothermal energy to help produce electricity. But they’re very electrically intensive operations.

The scientific reason for that is that the chemical bond between aluminum and oxygen is very strong. As a result of that, we need a lot of energy to break that bond apart, to produce aluminum the metal and oxygen the byproduct. A lot of energy is required for that.

You might also find it interesting that when the process was first developed back in the 1880s, and it took that long to produce pure aluminum — if I remember right, the year was 1883 — but the price of an ounce of aluminum was more expensive than the price of an ounce of gold just because of the manufacturing of it.

But anyway, we’ve taken this aluminum powder, which is a white powder, we’ve melted it into a silvery-colored metal, and we do that inside a furnace. Then we tap the furnace — in other words, we pour out the molten aluminum and we either produce cast products from the aluminum or we produce what are called ingots for subsequent working. We either make castings directly or we make ingots.

Cast products, examples of them, might be engine blocks, wheel rims for automobiles, even some small appliances (there are toasters that are cast), patio furniture, tools, cookware — a lot of things wind up just as cast products.

But if we’ve produced an ingot, now we have various methods that we take to produce an engineered product, if you will. We can extrude the aluminum — in other words, we can take an aluminum ingot and we can put it in a press and press it into a form and we can make things like aluminum ladders, bicycle frames, even certain airframe components, out of extruded material. We can take these ingots and we can roll them — we can roll them hot, or we can roll them cold — this is called hot rolling and cold rolling.

But we can turn around and when we roll it, we can make sheet, we can make plate, we can make something that we’re all very familiar with which is aluminum foil. We can make wire, heat exchangers, panels for automobiles, and battery components. Again, in the transportation industry, we can make a lot of things for automobiles or airplanes.

Similarly, we can also forge the material. We hot forge it in this particular case, but we can make various rings and blocks and cylinders and sleeves and components that we can then take and machine.

The process of manufacturing aluminum is relatively straightforward, and it winds up, as I said, with an ingot of some type that is then manufactured into a product.

Doug Glenn (DG): I want to jump in with two thoughts:

You’re talking about that the manufacturing of aluminum from raw materials is highly energy intense. Two points on that: One, it’s much more energy intense than steel production, for one thing, and secondly, that makes some sense of why it is we do so much recycling (or at least try to) of aluminum, because it’s a lot cheaper to take already formed aluminum (an aluminum can or an aluminum wheel off a car) and melt it down. The amount of energy to do that is a lot less than it is to create aluminum from scratch. That was one thing, Dan, if you want to comment on that.

The second thing is you were talking about extruding. I imagine that most everyone knows what that is. You were talking about pressing it into a form. You’ve got to remember that with an extrusion, you’re pressing it through a dye. It’s kind of like your playdough that you push in that form, and you get a shape coming out the other end — that’s extrusion, and not to be confused with forging where you’re putting it into a closed thing and pressing it into a form.

DH: Those are both very, very good comments. Interestingly enough, when you get into iron and steel making, the minerals, the iron oxides if you will, are far easier to break the bond between iron and oxygen than it is between aluminum and oxygen. That’s why the aluminum is such an energy intensive process.

And absolutely correct — recycling saves a tremendous amount of cost and is something that is vital to the long-term success of aluminum because an aluminum product, in general, is more expensive than a steel product.

You are correct — when you extrude something, you basically squeeze it through a dye, if you will. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in forging.

I want everyone to understand that when we start to talk about iron and steel making, because the process has been around for such a long time, there are certain terms that are used in the manufacturing process that have become synonymous with the process itself. Once again, we start out with an iron oxide, a mineral in the form of magnetite or hematite. We take that raw ore and we put it into something called a blast furnace. This is where we do a process called “smelting” of the material. We form a metal by taking and reducing the ore in the presence of air under pressure.

Coming out of the blast furnace is molten metal, molten iron, if you will. Now, historically, it’s called “pig iron.” The reason for that is when they originally cast different molds with shapes, the resulting structure looked like a litter of piglets that were actually suckling on their mother. So, the term “pig iron” came about. These little “pigs,” if you will, were broken off from the main casting. As I said, there are a lot of historical things going on.

In the old days, you then took the pig iron and you put it into what is called either a BOF (basic oxygen furnace) or an EAF (electric arc furnace) and then you remelted the pigs, if you will. But today, in most of the BOF and EAF processes, you wind up charging a hot liquid iron into those furnaces. They heated up, or continued to heat up, and then you turn around after you’ve converted the pig iron (which is about 94% iron and 6% impurities, so it’s still very impure) and with processing in a BOF or EAF furnace, you get the impurity levels down to less than 1%.

You might say to yourself, “Why is that important?” The idea in steel making is to take the raw material — the iron — and take everything out of it, so we can precisely add back in just those chemical elements that we want to make a particular type of steel. That’s essentially what the BOF or EOF is doing it; it’s converting the molten metal (or the pig iron) into a very, very pure material.

We then do a process which is called “tapping.” We transfer the raw material into a ladle furnace and inside the ladle is where we do the remainder of the refining process. What we wind up doing is we purify the material — we get rid of the additional impurities that are present, anything from hydrogen and oxygen and excess nitrogen to tramp elements and things of this nature. So, in the ladle, we do the refining. This can be done in a vacuum process, a vacuum degassing process, it can be done with an argon process, if you will. But we go from the blast furnace to the refining furnace (the BOF or the EAF), we then go into the ladle and what we’re doing is we’re taking the raw material and we’re making a purer and purer and purer form of, first of all, iron, and then we’re starting to add in elements that we want to make a particular grade of steel or type of steel. Then we’re going to do a process called “teeming” and “casting.” Teeming is basically pouring the molten metal into molds.

What we wind up with is we have a process where we have liquid steel and we’re going to send it into either something called a continuous caster, we’re going to make ingots out of it, or we’re going to take and atomize the steel. I want to talk about atomizing the liquid steel first. The process is done by adding a gas such as nitrogen or argon or even air, or by using water, but the idea here is that what you wind up with is a powder metal.

By the way, it’s called “powder” metallurgy not “powdered” metallurgy. Powdered is cookies, but powder is what we produce from the atomizing process. The powder can either be spherical in nature or it can be rounded or even irregular-shaped, depending on the type of atomization process. But we take this liquid stream of metal, and we impinge it with either water or gas and burst it or break it apart into particles. Then we do a simple process which is called screening of those particles — it’s basically taking and getting finer and finer, or dividing the powder into finer and finer powders.

Depending on the purification of the powder, how fine the powder is, we use it for what we call conventional powder metallurgy, so we take and use it for basic sintering operations, for example. You’re all familiar with the rearview mirror on your automobile. Interestingly enough, the rearview mirror fits into something called a mirror mount, and that mirror mount is a powder metal part. It happens to be a stainless steel, but it’s a powder metal part.

The idea is the fact that we can have a conventional powder metal. We can have (if we use finer powder) a metal that is suitable for metal injection molding for making things like firearm components, orthodontic braces and things of this nature, or other medical-type devices. Or, if we get a superfine powder, we can turn around and we can use it for something called additive manufacturing.

We’ll talk a little bit more about these later, but from the casting process, we can either go into a continuous caster, we can make ingots, or we can atomize the liquid steel.

If we go into a continuous caster, we’re cooling down the steel and we’re producing three products — they’re called blooms, billets, and bars. Basically, the difference between them is their physical shape. A billet might only be 10 inches square or something of this size (10 x 10 x 10 inches). A bloom is defined as something that is less than one hundred square inches, typically, except if it’s a jumbo bloom caster which makes bigger blooms, but we’ll ignore that as it gets complicated quickly.

The idea here is the fact that we’re either going to take the liquid steel, we’re going to cool it down in some continuous fashion or we’re going to put it into a mold to make an ingot or we’re going to atomize it using water or a gas to make a powder. Those are the three forms that come out of this whole process.

DG: Dan, I’ve got a quick question for you on that: With the aluminum, you mentioned that you can melt it and then cast it directly into a finished product (a cast product). Do we do that much with steel? Do we often take steel and actually take it directly into an alternator casing or some other finished part?

DH: Absolutely. There is a lot of cast steel that is used. The example that comes quickly to mind are probably valve bodies that are used in the petrochemical industry and things. If you think about the iron side, you’re very familiar with cast iron skillets and cast iron cookware. You can also have steel castings as cookware, but you typically don’t as it’s more expensive. But yes, you can make a variety of products directly as a casting.

As I said, you can make powder metallurgy products, and you can also make a family of products that we then call wrought products. What we do is we take those billets, blooms, and bars and then we either hot work them or cold work them to make various types of materials. We can roll them, we can pierce them, we can forge them. We can make sheet, we can make plate, we can make bar and tubular products, we can make wire, we can make strip. A good example is the fact that if you’re a razor blade manufacturer, you want to order material from the mill that’s in the form of strip, thin strip actually.

If, on the other hand, you’re in the oil and gas industry, and if you’re ordering pipe or tubing for use, as we call it, “down hole”, obviously it does no good to have delivered a strip of steel or a sheet of steel or a plate of steel, you want something obviously in the form a tube or a pipe that can then be used.

For more information:

www.heat-treat-doctor.com

dherring@heat-treat-doctor.com

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #76: Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today – Mill Processes and Production, Part 1 Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #75: Reimagining Furnace Compliance with C3 Data’s Matt Wright

June 9, 2022 / CONTROLS TECHNICAL CONTENT, FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

Heat Treat Radio host and Heat Treat Today publisher, Doug Glenn, talks with Matt Wright, the chief marketing officer at C3 Data, to hear how the company has reimagined furnace compliance to fit in your pocket.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Radio: Reimagining Furnace Compliance with C3 Data’s Matt Wright

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn: Matt, Welcome to Heat Treat Radio. This is your first time on.

Matt Wright: It’s good to be with you.

DG: I do want you to spend a little bit of time giving our listeners a little bit about your background and then, also, if you don’t mind, a quick summary of what C3 Data does, just so our listeners have a concept.

MW: I’ve been in the heat treat industry now for about 15 years. My brother, Nathan, and I together, we own a few — twenty-five — accredited pyrometry labs. C3 Data really comes as an outgrowth of that. Looking for an opportunity or way to reduce errors, a human element, and to save time with all of our technicians doing all the work that they’re doing. And so, it really became something that we did for ourselves and realized that it could be something that the industry as a whole could use.

When you look at our industry, there are two ways that you can comply with the AMS2750 CQI-9 specifications. One is what I would call the “roll your own method” which is what everyone has been doing from the beginning: that is using a whole panoply of different technologies, whether that’s an Excel spreadsheet, a clipboard, post-it notes, or what have you — anything and everything that you can do to try to remember to do all the things that need to be done, and then you go to the audit and hope that nothing fell through the cracks. What C3 Data does is takes all of those requirements and starts with the spec and encapsulates everything in one platform, one system, so you don’t have to think about and remember to do those things, you just follow what we have you do, and you come out and you’re ready for your audit.

DG: I want to jump back onto the labs you were talking about. Very briefly, how many where are they?

MW: We’ve got one in Ohio and one in Mexico that has three different offices in Mexico.

DG: And these are metallurgical labs, or did you say testing labs?

MW: They are labs that go on site to perform temperature uniformity surveys, system accuracy tests, instrument calibrations and those types of things.

DG: Let’s talk about compliance. Compliance with AMS2750 CQI-9 NADCAP is really an issue that is important to a lot of our listeners and readers, primarily those manufacturers who have their own in-house heat treat and have their own furnaces. Let’s talk about some of the latest developments, the latest technologies in that field. What are you seeing out there, Matt?

MW: When I look at our industry, one of the things that is the biggest challenge is the flow of information — getting information from where it resides to where it needs to be in the format that it needs to be. I think the technologies that have been successful in our industry are technologies that help lubricate that flow, if you will. A good example, I think you had mentioned some of the specs, but one of them is ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations specifications. In that case, you’re trying to prevent information from going to malign influence and so they’re going to use things like the Cloud and mobile technology. And those are the platforms that we’ve been built on, as well. But we’re kind of using it in reverse; we’re trying to disseminate information and getting it there as quickly as possible. So, the Cloud and mobile technology, I think, are the two biggest forms of technology that have been really helpful.

A couple other ones that we’re actually using that we’re seeing a little bit more and more of is OCR- optical character recognition. This is the ability to take a static document that has information on it and digitize it and get it to where it needs to be. We’re using that to be able to scan, for example, thermocouple cert, so that our customers, irrespective of who they’re buying their certs from, can just take a cert, scan it and build it right into their platform so they can use it to do an SAT in real-time.

Another one is the QR code. You know, with the things that are going on, it’s kind of made a comeback in recent days. Now you can get your wine list by scanning a QR code at the restaurant. Well, we’ve been using it since before it was cool to do that; we’ve been using to scan your thermocouples or your field test instrumentation, so you don’t have to go and look up something in a database or a table, you can just scan it in and, boom, you’re ready to go.

DG: This OCR is interesting regarding the certifications on the thermocouples. So, a thermocouple comes in, it’s got its stats and whatever you’re scanning, that becomes part of your data, if you will, correct? And are they using it for anything else? For example, I’m thinking in my mind, a company who wants to transition over to using a system like yours, perhaps they’ve got a lot of historical documents that, at least, would be helpful. Is that also an application?

MW: Certainly, a potential application could exist for that. We’ve got other tools with forms and things that we’ve put in place to make that transition from going from, what I call the “roll your own” in the static thing and pulling all of that information in. We’ve really made it, and strive to make it, more and more seamless every time.

DG: And the QR codes? Are you using those on furnaces, on thermocouples, or where are you using those?

MW: Any equipment that you use, whether it’s a thermocouple, a field test instrument, a data logger, any certification data that is associated with that, you can print a QR code and affix it to that. You’re not having to go and enter that in manually, you’re just scanning it in using our mobile app that has a QR code scanner built right in — it’s pulling that directly in. The whole idea is to reduce that bottle neck, if you will, and to get that information flow in so that these guys can do more value at a time out on the plant floor.

DG: I also wanted to ask you, because you mentioned about Cloud-based and mobile apps and things of that sort — let’s talk about security for just a second. I just got done doing an interview with a guy by the name of Mark Mills that hasn’t been released yet. He’s a fascinating guy and I’m going to give that one a plug right here- you need to listen to that when it comes out. But he was talking about cybersecurity- he wrote a book called The Cloud Revolution. I’ve also heard at some of the industry meetings that there have been real concerns where some of the larger companies are not wanting their data to go “outside,” if you will- they don’t want to break the ceiling and get into the Cloud, they want it on site. Are you guys seeing much of that? If so, how are you handling that?

MW: It’s a mix. We do see that. Every corporation has their own policies and procedures and what they’ve determined is a safe way to operate. So, on one side of the spectrum, we’ll get people that will be concerned and say, “Nothing in the Cloud,” and we have to have that conversation. Usually, the conversation revolves around what is the purpose of this information? And really, when you peel back and look at it, if someone were able to access the information in our system (which we have very tight security around), the only thing they’re going to find out is the very thing that those same preparations are bragging about on their website, and that is that they’re NADCAP compliant. There is no process-related data, there is no secret sauce involved in anything that we’re doing and so, it’s not something that we believe, and most people do end up seeing it our way that needs to be curtailed from a Cloud perspective.

DG: I know a lot of companies’ concerns are not so much that something will get out about them as it is this Cloud connection is a gateway for the nefarious amongst us to break in and get it. I’m sure you’re seeing that, right? Let me ask you it this way: What percentage of your clients are actually saying to you, “Listen, we want this to not be Cloud-based, we want it to be just on-site.”

MW: If I could swag, I would say maybe 5–10% ask the question, “Hey, is this something that we can just have locally because we would just like to have it for ourselves?” And the answer is, it’s not; it’s not something that we can have locally, just by nature of what it is — it’s an ongoing, continually improving and updated thing.

DG: Let’s talk about another hot point that we have here besides internet security. I don’t know if you guys have been affected by this, but it has to do with supply chain issues. We’ve got Covid to blame, we’ve got Russia to blame, we’ve got all kinds of things as far as supply chain. Are you experiencing any of that yourself for your business or are you seeing it from any of your customers?

MW: I think we are fairly isolated from that in that we’re not producing a tangible product; we’re a software company. Happily, we’re not experiencing that so much. I will say that, from our customers’ perspective, the big catchphrase now is “flexibility.” With those things that you mentioned, the ability to be able to adapt to not knowing from one day to the next if the guy that was supposed to do your SATs or TUSs today is even going to show up because he might test positive for Covid, or something else, really drives home the need to be flexible — to not put all your eggs in one proverbial basket. We’re striving asymptotically, if you will, to get closer and closer to that point where someone who’s never done a calibration before, can pick up an app and literally, the same day, start doing calibrations. There are a lot of hills to climb and obstacles to overcome, but we’re pretty close and we’re going to strive to keep doing that so that people don’t have to worry about what if this guy quits, or what if this guy gets a promotion? The system is going to run, and they can pick up and run with it with the next guy.

DG: When we talk supply chain, I start to think to myself, to a certain extent, I start to think internationally a little bit because a lot of the issues are bottlenecks at the border and things of that sort. But it makes me wonder — how about you guys, C3 Data, are you just North America or are you seeing business outside?

MW: Being a software company, one of the benefits of it is that you don’t have to ship anything anywhere. Being a U.S.-based company, we started out here and most of customers are here. We have a fair number of customers in Mexico, we have a few in the United Kingdom and we’re expanding currently, bringing on customers in France. Right now, we’ve got about four or five different languages that the website and the app is translated into, and we’re interested in expanding. It’s a great question and one that we’re really excited about — being able to not just be so parochial in the United States, but to expand into Europe.

DG: Tell me a bit about the mobile app. Let’s say you’re a manufacturer and you’ve got an in-house heat treat department. How often are you going to be using that mobile app as opposed to how often are you going to be using a desktop application, and how is the mobile app used?

MW: The decision to go with the mobile app came from our experience as a heat treat lab. Having to schlep around a laptop in a laptop bag or a cart with a computer on it, it’s really kind of a pain, quite frankly. Virtually everyone owns a cellphone. So, if we can put this into the power of a cellphone and enable that person to carry one less thing and to have the flexibility to not need to have to have that to do an SAT, to do a calibration, to change a sensor and those types of things, that’s what we wanted to do. You can use the app, you can run it on a laptop if you wish, and we have a few customers that just do that, but most of our customers (I would say over 90%), use the app, and depending on how fat their fingers are, they might go to a tablet.

DG: On a typical day when they’re using the app, they’re using it to do what? Run us through what would be a typical application.

MW: The mobile is primarily just used to do instrument calibrations and system accuracy tests. When you go out to do these tests, there is a whole lot of information that you need to have, and you need to be able to record information. Everything that you need is on the app, whether it’s defining what test sensor you’re using, what field test instrument you’re using, what furnace class the furnace is — everything is there. So, they’re using it just to record information. As they’re using that app and putting that information in, their reports are literally being generated in real-time and waiting for the quality manager to review whenever he or she wants to.

DG: I wanted to ask you about the different standards that you guys are covering. The three biggies we always think about are NADCAP, AMS2750, and CQI-9, and I’m sure you’ve got compliance with all of those. Are there any other major ones that you think any of our captive heat treaters might be interested in? I know the commercials will be interested in all of them, but any our captives might be interested in?

MW: Yes. Those two are the big ones — the AMS2750 spec and CQI-9 — that’s going to cover your aerospace and your automotive specification. We have the ability to give our customers, and a lot of our users do take advantage of it to create their own custom specs. They can just define their custom specs, their criteria, their frequencies, and then use the same platform that we built for these two specs, out of the box, to drive the compliance to whatever spec they want. So, it’s very open — it’s kind of agnostic in that regard. But we just built in those two AMS2750 and CQI-9 specs because that’s going to hit over 90% of what everybody wants.

Just a thing about those specs: Whenever those specs revise, like when CQI-9 went from rev 3 to 4 and when AMS2750 revision from E to F, and now, coming up in June when it revises to G, one of the benefits of having a Cloud-based solution is that all of our customers, when it went to F, all they had to do was log into the portal, find their furnace and go from E and select F and they’re off and running. That’s all they had to do. No training is required. It saves a lot on time of training, and you don’t have to redo the paperwork. The reports and all those things are now current revision.

DG: And Rev G of AMS2750 is probably out. I was just at some industry meetings and the big stink about the AMS2750 is going to a tenth of a degree on some measuring tools and things of that sort. Are you guys are able to handle that? I assume, being the software guys, it probably doesn’t really matter to you whether it’s a tenth or a hundredth or whatever. But you can cover that?

MW: Yes, absolutely. Now the tenth of a degree thing, I believe, is going to be extended for another year so that users are going to have one more year for that. The date we’re hearing and looking at is the end of June, so I think June 29^th, which I think is the two-year anniversary of Rev E to F, so it will be coming out then, if nothing else changes.

DG: The fellows I was hearing from were saying basically there is talk of the extension, but they’ve got to get it passed to actually get the extension, otherwise end of June is the date that most people are going to have to nail that with.

Your C3 Data tool is basically Cloud-based, portable, whether it’s website, phone, tablet or whatever, to help people comply. When the auditor walks in to get the information they want, how easy is it for your clients? What do they need to do? I assume this is where the real time and money-savings come in, correct?

MW: Correct. What we like to tell people is, in a nutshell, C3 Data is going to save you time and help you pass your audits. The time saving is happening all during the year. Every SAT you do, you’re saving an enormous amount of time because you’re not writing in your reports, you’re not doing any calculations — you’re aggregating and gaining time throughout the year.

You’re also going to gain time in your audit preparation because, as you mentioned, when you log into your portal, your ability to find all of your documentation, along with our furnace dashboard which shows you, furnace by furnace, the compliance status of each one of them. You can see, in real-time, the compliance status is a huge timesaver and a real peace of mind that you can walk in with your hand on your heart and know from the auditor’s perspective, you’re going to have a good experience, because if he wants to see something, it’s very easy to find and you’re well prepared.

DG: Timesaving has got to be enormous. I know there are a lot of companies investing a lot of time in these audits and in compliance-related things.

You guys do a lot of work in this area. Are there any good tools out there for any of our viewers/readers if they want to go and find out more information, whether it’s dealing with compliance, what is AMS2750, what is CQI-9, any of that kind of thing? Any suggestions from you on where people might want to go?

MW: On our website, c3data.com, we’ve got a portion there that you can look up for training. We have a curriculum of training courses where they can come and educate themselves, whether it’s, like you say, to learn about what the spec is or maybe take a deeper dive into some of those fields — we have those available. We love talking to our customers and our prospects, too.

One of the things I will mention: In going back to the web as a software service model, one of the things that’s ongoing is the ability to support. We’ve been through so many of these audits and we know the spec probably more than the next guy and when you look at some of the testimonials on our website, you’ll see that they obviously love the product, but they love the ability to call one of us, and if we don’t know the answer, we’ll find out the answer and get them plugged into what they need. We enjoy talking about it.

This year, we’re going to be at the Furnace North America show in Indianapolis which is my hometown which will make it quite easy for me to get there. But we’re going to have a special guest, Doug Shuler, who’s going to be joining us at our booth. So come on by the booth and get all your questions answered by Doug.

DG: If his name is Doug, he can’t be all bad.

Matt, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys continue to grow and you’re offering a great service to heat treaters, so best of luck to you.

MW: I enjoyed it, Doug, thank you.

DG: You bet.

For more information:

Matt's email: mwright@c3data.com

C3 Data website: www.c3data.com.

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #75: Reimagining Furnace Compliance with C3 Data’s Matt Wright Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #74: Water in Your Quench with Greg Steiger, Idemitsu

May 12, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT, QUENCHING TECHNICAL CONTENT

Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, talks with Greg Steiger of Idemitsu Lubricants America Corp. about the causes and dangers of water in your quench tank, how to know if you have too much, and what to do about it if you do. This highly-informative episode is a must watch/listen for those who oil quench.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Radio: Water in Your Quench with Greg Steiger, Idemitsu

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG): Greg, welcome to Heat Treat Radio. This is the first time you’ve been on, and I know we’ve talked about doing this for quite a while, so, welcome!

Greg Steiger (GS): Thank you, it’s my pleasure.

DG: I asked the question, before we hit the record button, but I think we need to ask the question again: The big white flag in the background with the W, you need to tell us about that.

GS: That’s the flag that they fly outside of Wrigley Field every time the Cubs win. They’ve been doing this for almost a century so that way when they were only playing day baseball and you could come home on the L, you could see if the Cubs won or lost without looking at a box score.

DG: That’s great! Now, you are not in the Chicago area, are you?

GS: No, I’m in the Columbia, SC area, but I was born and raised in the Chicago area.

DG: So, you’re a Cubby fan.

GS: I am.

DG: Being from Pittsburgh, I forgive you for that.

So, Greg, first thing, can you give our listeners and viewers a brief background about yourself and then we’ll jump into the water topic, so to speak?

GS: Sure. I got into this industry when I graduated from college in 1984 as a formulating chemist. I eventually worked my way into, what we call, customer service or tech service, where I’d go out and visit customers, run product trials if customers had problems. I worked my way into laboratory management and eventually sales and marketing. I’ve been at Idemitsu for the past 9 years. Since I’ve been at Idemitsu, I’ve earned a master’s degree in materials engineering, and I’ve learned a lot about heat treat and it’s really become my passion. I am currently the market segment leader for heat treat products for Idemitsu.

DG: I should congratulate you on that degree, by the way. I know a year or so ago, you were still working on that, so that’s great!

GS: May 6^th I graduate.

DG: Tell us, just briefly, for those who might not know about Idemitsu. We can see it on your shirt but tell us about them a little bit, so people have a sense.

GS: Idemitsu is a very well-kept secret here in the U.S. They are actually the 8^th largest oil company in the world. We are a Japanese owned company. There is about an 85-90% chance that no matter what vehicle you drive, you’ve got some of our fluids in it. The largest market share is the automotive air conditioning compressor market, but basically, if you drive a Honda, Mazda, Subaru, or Toyota, it left the plant with our engine oils, our transmission fluids in it at the factory.

When it comes to quench oils on the industrial side, Idemitsu is actually the 2^nd largest quench oil provider in the world. Even though we’re Japanese, all of our heat products, in general, are made and blended here in the U.S.; we don’t import anything from Japan for our heat treat products.

DG: Very interesting. So, a big company — somebody worth paying attention to, I think is the point. You’re right — it’s the best kept secret. We’re trying to work to not make it so secret.

GS: We’re doing what we can, Doug.

DG: This next question I’m going to ask you is very, very basic and most people listening I’m sure will know this but there may be some who don’t: Why is water in quench oil a problem?

GS: A little bit of water is not a problem because it will happen naturally through condensation, but when you start to get too much water in there, a couple of things happen. Our research has shown that basically about 200-250 ppm water, you start to get uneven cooling.

A quench oil is not a completely homogenous fluid; it’s possible to have water in one area of the tank and no water in the other so you can get different cooling speeds in different areas of the tank. When you start getting up to large amounts of water, somewhere around 750 ppm to over 1000 ppm, it becomes a safety issue. What happens is — when water turns into steam, it actually expands. Most things when they get warmer, they contract, but water is the opposite — it expands. It expands 1600 times at boiling and the hotter the steam gets, the more it expands.

"A little bit of water is not a problem because it will happen naturally through condensation, but when you start to get too much water in there, a couple of things happen. Our research has shown that basically about 200-250 ppm water, you start to get uneven cooling."

Think of it: If you have a gallon of water in a 3,000-gallon quench tank, when you boil that water, it turns into 1600 gallons of steam, and it’s got nowhere to go but up and out of the quench oil and it’s going to carry the quench oil with it onto flame curtains, other hotspots on the furnace, and that’s why it becomes so dangerous.

DG: It’s really the risk of explosion, in a sense. That’s basically what we’re talking about. I could be wrong, but my gut feeling is that a vast majority of quench fires are started because of water that happened or simply the product not getting down into the quench fast enough. But a lot of it is caused by carrying water in with the part.

GS: Not necessarily on the part but being in the oil itself through various means. As I said, it happens naturally every time you heat an oil up and you cool it down, you get condensation, but that’s usually only a few parts per million, and every time you drop a load in, you’re driving that water off.

DG: Right. Raising up the temperature and therefore boiling off the water.

GS: Right.

DG: This is a follow-up question into what we were just talking about, and maybe we’ve answered it: Where does the water come from? Is it typically just condensation or what are the top ways water gets into the tank?

GS: Condensation is something we can’t prevent because we live in a hot, humid environment. But what we can prevent is human error, and that’s where most of the water comes from. For instance, if a heat treater has their quench oil stored outside, perhaps in totes — it’s particularly important to make sure that the caps and lids on these totes or drums are very tight and secure because otherwise they’ll get condensation in there and rainwater in there.

We’ve seen instances where people are working on a furnace, and they will hit the sprinkles and the sprinklers will set off and put water into the quench oil. Heat treat furnace doors and, not so much anymore but, heat exchanges where water cooled. Anything that is under pressure is eventually going to leak and that’s why you see companies going to air-cooled heat exchangers. It’s still more difficult to get that air-cooled door and there is still some water in those doors. Like I say, anything under pressure is eventually going to leak and that’s where you see some of the water infiltration, as well.

DG: Typically speaking, how warm or how cool is the oil in a quench tank? You mentioned about condensation being caused by when it cools down, you’re going to have some condensation in there. Where do we run those tanks?

GS: It depends on if you’re using a hot oil or a cold oil. A cold oil is basically an oil that you add some heat to get it around 130-160 F, then you use your heat exchangers to keep taking the heat away when you quench the load in there. A hot oil you add heat to constantly because you want to keep that typically 250-300 F. In a hot oil, you really don’t have a lot of issues with water, unless the furnace goes down and then you get a lot more condensation than anything else. Now, cold oil, you have issues with water because you’re not above the evaporation point of the water.

DG: The bottom line is: If you’ve got too much water in the quench tank, it’s an issue.

Tell us about the measurement. How do we know if we’ve got water in there, and how do we know how much we have?

GS: Well, there are some portable test kits out there. The ones I’m familiar with are made by the Hach Company. You can purchase these from industrial supply houses like McMaster-Carr or places like that. They will give you ppm’s of water.

You heard a lot of old-timers always talk about crackle tests. That is not an effective way to determine how much water is in there. Our studies have shown that you can get as much as 1000-1500 ppm of water before that oil starts to crackle. The way you run a crackle test is — you take a hot panel, (that’s hotter than the boiling point of water), put a couple of drops of oil on it and if it crackles, there is water in there. Sometimes, the oil is so thick, it doesn’t really crackle, and you can’t see it until you get too much water in there.

The way all quench oil providers do it in their lab is something called a Karl Fischer titration. This is not something that the typical heat treater would have in their lab — it’s a relatively expensive piece of equipment. We use automated ones because we do so many at a time, but you can buy manual ones, if you’d like, and those are a little bit less expensive, but again, you’re talking about laboratory equipment and you’re talking about thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of dollars.

Another way to determine if you have water in your quench oil, especially on lighter colored quench oils, is to take a flashlight, put it in a clear beaker, and take a flashlight and put that flashlight at the bottom of the beaker. If nothing in that beaker is hazy and everything is very clear and amber and you can see through it, chances are there is no water in it. But if it’s a dark quench oil, like a lot of cold oils are where it’s almost jet black, the flashlight won’t do you any good.

One of our customers has talked about using a paste. Unfortunately, I don’t know the manufacturer of it, but what he did is he took a paste and put it on a wooden stick and stirred it all throughout its tank. The paste didn’t turn colors, so he knew there was no water in it. To prove that the paste was still good, he actually licked a finger and put it onto the paste and the past turned pink.

DG: This paste that you put on the stick, it doesn’t dissolve into the liquid — it’s just testing whether there is water there. And if it changes color, then you’ve got water. We’ll have to find out what that is and maybe we can put a note about that on the screen.

DG: Probably the best, most reasonable method that doesn’t cost so much, is maybe getting one of those testing kits. Do you have suggestions, Greg, on how frequently a heat treater ought to be checking his or her tank for water?

GS: I would say weekly. I don’t think it needs to be tested any more unless you think there’s a problem. If there’s a problem, obviously, test as often as you need to. But weekly is good enough.

Again, when you’re dropping a load into quench oil, you’re anywhere from 1300-1800 F, so when you drop that load in, you’re driving almost all of the water off that would be in the quench oil from condensation. It’s just if you’re worried about some sort of a human error, that’s when you want to take more frequent testing.

DG: So, it’s going to be somewhat dependent on your process.

How about the material that you are quenching? Are some materials more sensitive to water than others, or is not really an issue?

GS: Not really. It’s more of an issue of part geometry. And that goes really for distortion and cracking along with the water. A little bit of water can crack a very thin part, but on a very thick part, it may not have much effect at all.

DG: How about cosmetics? I know that some people are very concerned with cosmetics. Is water in the quench oil going to cause any issue with cosmetics, such as spotting?

GS: Short-term no, long-term yes. What causes a lot of stains is oxidation. Water, when it heats up, will actually dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen won’t oxidize the oil, but the oxygen does. That’s one of the reasons why heat treaters use flame curtains — not to allow the oxygen from the atmosphere into the furnace. At the temperatures that you heat treat at, it doesn’t take much oxygen presence to oxidize not only the parts, but also the oil.

DG: We talked briefly about why water is a problem. We talked about measuring it and trying to determine if you have an issue. Let’s move on to this: Ok, we’ve got water in the quench and it’s at an unacceptable level. What do we do?

GS: There are a few ways to do it. It really depends on what level of water you’re at, how safe you feel, and how soon do you need that furnace. Many furnaces have a bottom drain. If you turn the agitation off in the quench oil, the water is going to be heavier and denser than the oil and it will sink to the bottom. This is going to take a couple of days, at least. If you’re looking at 1000 ppm or so, this is probably the best way to do it, because then you can drain from the bottom of the tank until you no longer see water coming off and you see oil.

Let’s say you’ve got 500 ppm or 400. We recommend an upper limit of 200. For that you can run some scrap through your furnace. Again, you have to be incredibly careful because you’re not really at what would be an explosive level, but you don’t want to run good parts through there because you may get some strange hardness results — they may be higher in hardness than what you’re expecting.

Another way, (again, this will take some time), is to actually bring the temperature of your oil above the boiling point of water. If you brought it up to about 220 degrees or so, as the oil starts to evaporate, you will see bubbles and a froth (almost like a head you would see on a beer) come to the top of the oil tank. Once that’s gone, chances are your water is gone.

The last thing you can do is do a complete dump, drain, and recharge. But I would caution anybody who suspects that they have water in their quench oil, and you want to do any of this testing — before you run any loads through that furnace (with good parts), make sure you send a sample overnight to your quench oil provider and they can test it for you. That’s the biggest issue.

DG: I want to back up because you said something that I didn’t catch the fullness of, I don’t think. You said one of the solutions was to simply run scrap parts through your furnace?

GS: Yes.

DG: Now, how does that help you eliminate the water?

GS: Again, you’re taking these scrap parts and they come through your furnace and the furnace may be 1800-2200 degrees. When you dump that load into the quench, if you’ve got just a small amount of excess water, it will evaporate off.

DG: Gotcha. You’re basically bringing up the temperature of the oil so that the water evaporates.

GS: Exactly. You’re almost flashing it off.

DG: We talked about the draining and the replacing. I know of some companies recycle their oil. Any thoughts or comments about that that heat treaters ought to be aware?

GS: Yes, because that’s also a potential source of contamination for water because they skim the oil off of their cleaner tanks. I’ve been at a lot of heat treaters where they have these reclamation systems — they heat the oil up, theoretically they drive all the water off, but not always. Again, this is part of that human error. As a quench oil company, we understand that our customers are doing this, especially with oil continuing to go up. But, again, working with your quench oil supplier here is key because we’ll analyze the samples for our customers and tell them if they’re getting all that water off. Obviously, it’s in the quench oil supplier’s best interest, and the customer’s best interest, to make sure everybody is safe. If a plant burns down, nobody wins.

DG: We’ve discussed why water is a problem, how we measure it to make sure we know it, and then what to do with it. Being a quench expert, do you have any other resources, if someone was interested in learning more, whether it be specifically about water in quench oil or just other quench resources — is there anything that you can recommend for further reading?

GS: I wrote a series of articles on quench oil and how to get water out of the quench oil for your publication Heat Treat Today. Also, how to use your analysis from your quench oil supplier to operate your furnace. You should always let the data tell you how to operate a furnace and not do something just because we’ve always done it this way.

Others, such as Scott Mackenzie, have presented papers. I know back in 2018, there was a conference Thermal Processing in Motion by ASM, and he presented a paper there on how to get rid of water out of quench oil.

DG: Any other resources you’d like to recommend to people?

GS: Use your quench oil supplier. They are the experts. They’re the ones that have all of the testing equipment you need and use them as a resource. Quite frankly, if you don’t get the service from your current quench oil supplier, there are a bunch of us out there, and that’s how we distinguish ourselves — through our service — so find somebody with better service.

DG: There are a number of quench oil suppliers out there. I know some of them are not specifically targeting the heat treat market, but people still use them because they’re a local distributor or something like that.

I want to recommend to people that if you’re having trouble with the processing of parts, whether it be the mechanical properties and things of that sort, and you have a hint that it might be quench-related, it’s probably best to get ahold of people like Greg, who are actually focused in more on the heat treat market. They may have some good recommendations. This is just an encouragement to people that if you’re not using a heat treat specific quench company, there are a couple of them out there and, obviously, Greg at Idemitsu, we appreciate you giving us a little bit of expertise today.

Thanks very much, Greg. Appreciate it very much and appreciate you being with us.

GS: Thanks for your time, Doug. I appreciate the opportunity.

For more information:

Greg's phone: 919-935-9910.

Greg's email: gsteiger.9910@idemitsu.com

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #74: Water in Your Quench with Greg Steiger, Idemitsu Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #73: Energy’s Bright Future with Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

April 28, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, talks with Mark Mills, one of the nation’s foremost experts on energy and technology about the future of energy and technology in the North American heat treat industry.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Radio: Energy’s Bright Future with Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG): I’m really tickled about this interview. For most of you, this gentleman is a heat treat industry ‘outsider,’ but listen, he probably knows more about energy and emerging technologies than pretty much anybody in the industry. I’m really looking forward to talking to Mark Mills, today.

Mark and I first met at the International Thermprocess Summit (ITPS) in Düsseldorf in 2017, back in the heyday of Marcellus and Utica Shale. So, Mark, first off, welcome, glad to have you here.

Mark Mills (MM): Thanks for having me. That was back when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth, I guess, right? It seems like a long time ago.

DG: That’s right. It does seem like a long time ago.

Let me give our listeners and viewers a quick idea of your background and then we’ll jump into some questions. I told Mark, before we hit the record button, it’s probably going to take me longer to introduce you than it is for the rest of the conversation.

MM: They can always google me in the magic machine, and they’ll know more than they want to know anyway, but go ahead, Doug.

DG: That’s exactly right.

Mark is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute which is a conservative think tank in New York City. He is also a Faculty Fellow at Northwest University’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and a strategic partner at Montrose Lane, an energy technology venture fund. Before this, he was chairman and CTO of the ICx Technologies which he helped take public in 2007.

He is either author or coauthor of four books: a 2005 book which I found to have a very interesting title: The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. That was coauthored with Peter Huber. In 2018, Work in the Age of Robots, which is interesting. Our publication recently did some work talking about how to work with robots. In 2020, Digital Cathedrals. The last question I want to ask you today is about your book that is just coming out or has just come out: The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the New Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s.

Mark has also published a lot of articles in The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Forbes, USA TODAY, and RealClearPolitics. He has been on TV on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS and now Heat Treat Radio (straight to the top!). Also, in 2005, he was on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which, by the way, I watched and liked. He’s also just recently joined the podcast ranks, so congratulations on that. This is a podcast I will recommend because I’ve listened to every episode so far, believe it or not, all three of them!

MM: Number four goes live in a few days!

DG: For those of you listening, the podcast is called The Last Optimist. My information says that it started on February 24^th with “Unleashing Innovation,” so I highly recommend that.

The only other thing I want to mention about your background, Mark, was that you were in the White House’s science office as a staff consultant under President Ronald Reagan.

Again, welcome, and my first question to you is this: Did you ever meet Ronald Reagan?

MM: No, I was a kid, and I like to remind people that I was still in diapers at that time, so it doesn’t date me too much. When you talk to students and they hear “Reagan,” it would be as if, when I was a student, somebody came and talked to me and said they worked for Grover Cleveland, it would’ve been unimpressive. No, I never met him. I was twenty-something and the kids worked in little cubicles or cages, and you got fed your work, you worked seven days a week and you did what you had to do, and the President didn’t meet with the kids. Peggy Noonan, who famously was his speech writer, she was a contemporary — I didn’t know her then and I don’t know her now — but she wrote, some years later, that she never met the President either. I had a hand in writing one of his speeches because it was the only energy speech he ever gave. The speech writers were required to fly it by us techies in the science office to make sure they didn’t screw up, so I rewrote some of that speech — it was fun.

DG: I was going to say, that would’ve been right in the middle of the energy crisis. It seems to me there were a lot of energy crisis things going on and he was coming off of [President] Carter.

MM: Exactly. We had a combination of things: the 1979 Iranian revolution which, of course, then with the Carter’s presidency and also led to a 200% increase in oil prices, almost overnight, and so the world was in thrall of alternatives to energy and oil back then. Congress, in 1980, passed something I’ve been warning oil companies about ever since — the Windfall Profit Tax Act — to punish oil companies for making money for the foresight of having drilled oil before a price rise and storing it and selling it after a price rise, which used to be a business called “a smart commodity play” but Congress criminalized it. It took, I think, eight years before that law was repealed. It was a feckless law; it did not achieve its purposes, it just damaged American businesses. But anyway, I digress.

DG: Yes, but you know what? It just goes to show you no good deed will be unpunished.

MM: Yes, and Congress may do it again. They are talking about it again.

But my book comes out at a curious time. I wrote it during Covid lockdown times which is a dispiriting time to write an optimistic book, but I make analogies in my introduction to the book to the 1920s which also a dispiriting time. 1920 was the third wave of the 1918 flu, which in per capita terms was 400% more lethal than the Corona virus has been, and it primarily killed young people. The Corona virus has primarily killed old people. So, it was a devastating time. We had come off a horrific world war. We were in the middle of massive race riots in the early 1920s of a level that are, frankly, unprecedented and still haven’t been repeated, thank God. We had political turmoil over the fears of the Red Scare; this was right on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution and worries about communism infiltrating the western world, especially the United States. The world though, technologically, took off.

The 1920s were a time of great convergence of technologies of that era — not just one thing, it was multiple things. We had the dawn of a practical automobile, the dawn of practical airplanes, the advent of radio communications, the proliferation of telephony in homes, we had pharmaceuticals appear for the first time in history and chemical polymers that allowed cheaper products for consumers. It was a time of torrid growth that led to roughly 75 years of the greatest expansion of wealth and wellbeing the world has ever seen.

It also didn’t mean we didn’t have war. As I pointed out in the introduction to my book, governments can do stupid things, and one would expect another war, and I wrote this book right before the war broke out in Ukraine, not because I wanted a war, but because we fight wars, unfortunately. We can expect other recessions and depressions — that will happen too. All of that happened in the 20^th century, yet the technological changes of the 20^th century, everybody knows, brought astounding advancements in wellbeing and wealth, so the question you would have is, Could it happen again? Now, there are some economists (and it’s typically the economists) who say, “No. The new normal is slow growth. All the big things have been invented.” I call them “the new normalists.” The new normalists are wrong, and in my book, I set out to prove we’re on the cusp of a revolution not in one thing, but across all the same three fronts of transportation, machines and materials, and communications. Although, the lead title is the Cloud because at the center of it is something that is really unique — the cloud infrastructure is truly a unique thing in human history.

DG: Well, it sounds like a fascinating book. I may ask you a little bit more about it towards the end, but it sounds very good.

MM: You might even enjoy it if you read it! It’s available now at Amazon.com!

DG: I’ve got to get it. I honestly have not read it yet.

MM: I do have several chapters on energy in the book, of course.

DG: You mentioned materials, though, Mark. Do you have anything on materials in there?

MM: Yes, absolutely.

DG: Great. I can tell you a lot of people in our audience will be interested in that.

Let me ask you the first question. I want to harken back to something you said, which I think will be kind of provocative for our audience, and that was when you were on the deadly serious Jon Stewart Show. You said (or he said, I can’t remember which), “We don’t have an energy problem, we have a technology problem.” Why don’t you explain that, please?

"There is essentially an infinite supply of energy. Energy is all around us in all kinds of forms. It is always a question of what technologies are available to tap into nature’s energy forms (whatever the form is) in ways that are acceptable, and acceptable means affordable, reliable, clean enough — all the metrics that we care about in society — but it is always a technology problem. So, if you think there’s a shortage of energy, you’re essentially saying we’ve stopped technology innovation." - Mark Mills, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

MM: It was an interesting show, by the way. I hope he picks up doing book interviews again on his podcast. It was most interesting. I can tell you this, and it’s not to suck up to Jon Stewart (because you’re not Jon Stewart and he’s not doing TV anymore), but when you’re on the book circuit, you don’t expect people to have read your book, you really don’t; it’s not a reasonable expectation. But you’re happy to talk about your book because the whole point of writing it is you want people to know it exists. He was the only person that had obviously read the book before I came on the interview. You could tell by the questions. He’s a very bright guy, a very curious mind, and he was fascinated by this. He got the point, and the point, of course, was: energy is physics — and I’m a physicist so I confess to that sort of bias — and there is no limit to energy in the universe. There is essentially an infinite supply of energy. Energy is all around us in all kinds of forms. It is always a question of what technologies are available to tap into nature’s energy forms (whatever the form is) in ways that are acceptable, and acceptable means affordable, reliable, clean enough — all the metrics that we care about in society — but it is always a technology problem.

So, if you think there’s a shortage of energy, you’re essentially saying we’ve stopped technology innovation. You can have interregnums where the innovation slows down. It can be hard to find the new solutions and take time, so that would be the “shortage.” Shortages occur in the sense that we max out our access to land because energy is always about accessing land somewhere. You have to get your hands on land whether you’re getting land where the wind is or land where the oil is. It’s the same thing.

DG: Or land where the sun shines, or whatever.

MM: It doesn’t matter. You have to pay for, whether politically or in dollar terms, access to land, and then you have to build machines, and building machines always requires the extraction of materials from the earth and, given your audience, always everywhere requires the application of heat to convert materials from one form to another, and the application of heat and physics — and your audience knows this — thermionically means you always have waste. That’s why part of our other book title was The Virtue of Waste. By that, what we meant was that the virtue of waste is the fact of applying heat to bring order to the universe to get higher ordered materials. It means that that is a virtue; we want to get high ordered materials and low entropy higher quality steels, different kinds of polymers. These things require heat, so that the presence of waste heat is actually a direct indication that we’re doing a virtuous thing of creating order in our universe.

DG: Not to say that we try to maximize the amount of waste, but the fact that we’re creating waste shows that we’re doing something and it’s something productive.

MM: No engineer ever maximizes waste. What engineers are stuck with is what the fact of conversion efficiencies require you. It’s a misnomer. The idea that there’s waste energy is a total misnomer; it is the price you pay to take entropy out of systems. It’s the price you pay for conversions. It’s a cost. Now, you want to minimize the cost, so in engineering terms, it means minimize the amount of waste heat because you spend all kinds of money making heat, so I don’t want to throw it away needlessly. But every engineer knows this fact: if it costs me more to reduce the amount of waste heat than the money, I’d have to spend to get additional input fuel, I’m going to buy the input fuel, because it’s always about money. It really is, for every business.

DG: Speaking of business: So, our industry, which you know relatively well, having spoken at the ITPS, you had a good taste of it there — we are heavily natural gas, right? Especially North America. Now, over in Europe, where we met, it wasn’t so much that — there’s still natural gas but there is heavier emphasis on electricity, as well. Before the Ukrainian crisis, what was the long-term look for energy, especially natural gas, here in North America? Then, I want to ask you after that, just to follow up: How has that changed since the Ukrainian crisis?

MM: The long-term look was the same before as it is after in terms of the physics reality. That is, the world needs a lot more energy and would need a lot more natural gas. And the U.S. would eventually —depending on what administration and what policies were in place from Congress — expand its production and its exports. That, in my view, is locked into reality. The velocity with which that happened is what Ukraine changed. Now, we haven’t seen evidence of the velocity changing yet, but I do think that the Ukrainian crisis will serve as a reset back to reality of what governments need to do, both in Europe and here in the United States, to provide the kind of energy needed to make electricity and the kind of energy needed to make heat in process industries.

DG: So, you’re saying same-same, basically. Let me ask you the next question because this might really get to the gist of it. As you know, it’s all about price, right? Short-term, mid-term natural gas prices. . . again, here in North America, what are you thinking and what should heat treat natural gas users be watching to help them know what’s coming down the pike?

MM: I think any big industrial users of natural gas have learned something in the recent decade of the shale revolution: the incredible increase in gas exports. The U.S. is now the largest natural gas exporter in the world. Although Qatar is going to work hard to surpass us; they just announced tens of billions of dollars of investment of new LNG (liquid natural gas) export capacity. I suspect Australia is going to do the same. We don’t have a similar response yet, so short-term we know that natural gas prices have migrated towards being commoditized like oil prices, so they have been dragged into the exchange markets of the world. What that means in the short-term is exactly what you’re already seeing: gas prices get dragged up as traders worry and think about where future supplies are going to come from.

So, I think we’re going to see more volatility in the future, but I made that prediction in 2015 in Düsseldorf. The volatility comes from the combination of expansion of a U.S. production and the commoditization of the market globally, so that’s normal. Which would argue, if you’re a big consumer, to look to making favorable long-term contracts with suppliers — pretty normal, whatever the commodity.

But I do think in the short-term, the markets will be stressed because there’s going to be a lot of pressure. Europe, I think, is inevitably going to want to have more U.S. LNG. This will redirect LNG exports from Asia to Europe. That will, in the short-term, push prices up because you can’t build pipes fast enough, and believe me, Putin is going to build more pipes to China — that’s one you can almost take to the bank. But that takes time. So, during the build-out of those pipes and the competition for gas, we’ll see how this administration responds to expediting new export terminals. By the way, expedite export terminals move more gas in the markets, I think counterintuitively will help lower gas prices. The more relief we put into the market of supply certainty, the more forward prices, I think, will get pulled down. Short-term, I think volatility with trending up, not “crazy up,” I don’t think. If Europe tried to ban the use of Russian gas, gas prices will go crazy up, as they did in the short-term in the windfall in Europe.

Longer term, I’m very bullish on gas prices being moderate and cheap again because the U.S. can produce astonishing quantities of gas. I’ve talked to producers, and I won’t name names, that when gas prices for consumers, you were all really happy when it was $2.00, but if you’re a producer, you’re not a happy camper. But producers were still making a profit at $2.00. Who knew? I mean, it’s crazy! Nobody thought that was ever possible. Look, to be fair, if you’re a consumer, you want 2 not 3 dollars, but give a world that used to see 5- and 10-dollar gas, you know that you can live with 3 dollar or 4-dollar gas and do very well in the world markets because everybody else in the world is paying 5 to 15 dollars. And at those prices (let’s just throw numbers 3-5 for the clearing price in the United States), the United States can produce gas until it’s coming out of our ears, to use the obvious expression. And ship it to the world, net [price] landing in Europe for 6, 7, 8; I just think it’s the biggest single revolution that’s still underappreciated — not the oil from American production, but the gas. It’s huge, it’s monstrous!

DG: I’m curious about Russia. I don’t know how much of what goes on over there is going to affect us, okay, but I’ve got a couple of questions about Russia: After the Ukrainian crisis is over, do you see Russia returning to be a major player (which I assume they are now) in the energy market as far as actual ability to produce the energy, and do you think there is going to be any long-term push-back against buying energy from them because of instabilities or people not trusting or anything of that sort?

MM: Back in the dawn of time, I was what you’d call a “cold warrior.” I was in the weapons research and development business during the 1980s, and so I’ve thought a lot about competition with Russia and the Soviet Union for a long time. I’m no more expert than a lot of people and I would commend Niall Ferguson’s most recent writings on this; he’s very astute about the history of Russia.

But I think it’s pretty clear that a couple things will happen, and a couple things could happen. The two things that will happen is that Russia will continue to produce gas. They don’t have anything else to make money with. The other thing that will happen is that if the West doesn’t buy it, other people will — India, Russia, China, African nations, South American nations. So, there is lots of offtake, and the growth is in Asia anyway.

But if we sanctioned the gas, all that means is that those that are buying the sanctioned gas get a discount. They still get to buy it. I don’t think we can sanction China for buying Russian gas — I just don’t think that’s going to happen; I think it’s extremely unrealistic. So, they’ll keep producing gas; they have to.

I think we’ll see a realignment of interest. So, the interest in having the U.S. and Australia and Qatar, for example, (those three big producers), increase their supply to the world while Russia still needs the revenue is favorable to lower prices, let’s just say, if you’re just thinking economic terms. It’s favorable geopolitically because there’d be some delinking although now, we have new dependencies and links — we’re strengthening the geopolitical linkages between, let’s say, China and Russia, so that may have some unintended consequences.

"We will survive it anyway, even with our feckless policy house right now. We are a very big economy and very high inertia. Even as much damage as politicians are trying to wreak on our domestic energy industry, it’s pretty resilient, but it can be destroyed."

The wild cards, of course, are principally in Russia’s capacity to actually operate in its environment. You know, a lot of its gas production is in the north in the Siberian regions and it’s technologically extremely difficult. They’ve had a lot of help from the top performers in this field and those are the western oil and gas companies — the Exxons, the BPs, the Shells. Those companies have already pulled back. If they pull away, either because they’re ordered to, they’re sanctioned, or they’re just nervous, Russia runs the kind of risk that Mexico is facing now; their production is going down. It’s the kind of risk that Brazil faced before they let western firms come back in. Production declines because they don’t have the engineering capabilities. It's not that they’re not good engineers: the western oil and gas companies are just profoundly good at what they do, especially in difficult environments like deep water in the Arctic. So, that’s a risk. And if that supply starts to slip and it slips faster than the West makes up the difference, then we get upward price pressure, and I don’t think anybody can begin to guess the next five years of production in Russia, at this point.

DG: You know there are a lot of Americans that believe that if we would do certain things politically, on our end of the equation, that the U.S. could fairly easily make it through this little crisis moment. You commented in one of your podcasts about a fact, (and correct me if not quoting you correctly on this), but you said that it’s not a technology or an energy shortage issue, it’s a policy issue. So, we are something along the line of producing 1.5 million fewer barrels of oil today at $120/barrel than we were a year ago at $60/barrel. Do you think America could survive most of this if we get policy house in order?

MM: We will survive it anyway, even with our feckless policy house right now. We are a very big economy and very high inertia. Even as much damage as politicians are trying to wreak on our domestic energy industry, it’s pretty resilient, but it can be destroyed. As I wrote in my book, it is possible to Sovietize an economy; the Soviets demonstrate it. Venezuela Sovietized their economy. But I don’t think that will happen in America. I’m realistic that more damage could be done but we will survive it. We can’t insulate ourselves from global pricing, so if global oil and gas prices and a lot of pressure is put on and goes up, we will see prices rise here, which, if it goes up enough, we will suffer a recession, too.

Look, if oil prices tracked what happened the last two times we had a major interruption (we haven’t had major supply interruptions except ’73 and ’74, and the ’73 interruption took oil up 400% overnight), we’d be talking $300-350 oil. The Iranian crisis took it up 200%. So, these numbers would be destructive to the economy, we would suffer a recession because of that; it would trigger a recession because it would move too much money into the markets that need fuel and industries would be damaged — you know the trajectory. I think that is not likely but the crisis in Ukraine is volatile enough that you can no longer say it’s impossible. If Putin were self-destructive, he’d say, “I’m hurting. You want to see hurt? I’ll show you hurt.” Just turn the spigots off and gas and oil going to Europe. That would cause a whole lot of hurt there. And would you call that an act of war? Well. . . .

Let me spin a theory: Let’s just say he decided to do it in a Machiavellian way rather than saying, “I’m turning off the spigot.” Let’s just say that the pipe got blown up Nord Stream 1. He would blame it on Czechian terrorists or Ukrainian terrorists, or maybe his guys did it, but actually blow it up, we would see gas prices go wild because Europe would have to make up the shortfall somehow.

This is what worries me about where we sit of which we have not many options except to reset our policies to send a signal to the world that we don’t want to be caught in this position again and to not be caught in this position again because we’re tied to the hip with Europe whether we like it or not. I think that’s basically a good thing, I just think we are. Europe and we have to have an energy policy that economically and structurally signal to the market that we’re going to delink from dependency. Not no Russian oil and gas, but how about if we get, I’ll pick a number, a third of it from Russia instead of 70% if you’re Germany? Then you have some resilience. If that were the policy of the European Union and the United States in combination, the mere act of announcing that policy in legislation — so you can’t change it easily — would push down the forward price of oil and gas because markets price against future expectations. Right now, the expectation is either the possibility of less or the possibility of a lot less, not the possibility of a lot more — that’s not the expectation yet.

DG: Two more quick questions: Listening to some of you stuff, you’re not an anti-renewables type of guy, so again, thinking about our industry, I’m just curious, do you ever see a place where renewables of any type will play a significant role in industry, in general, but, more specifically, high intensity places where natural gas is used like the heat treat industry?

MM: No. That’s the short answer.

DG: Now the follow up: Why?

MM: The majority of processes can’t be done electrically. We can use microwaves, as you know, for a lot of processes, and plasma, so there is a lot of work in that area, and some very promising things. But there is really no easy path to replacing the efficiency, both thermodynamic efficiency and economic efficiency, of high temperature heat (flames) — that’s the nature of processing materials. So then, you’re only option is the current affection for “green hydrogen.” This is a profoundly misplaced aspiration. First, if we’re going to use hydrogen that we could begin to afford and produce at scale, it will be by reforming natural gas. So, it’s economically obvious — stripping the carbon out of CH₄ just to burn the H is expensive and energetically counterproductive. So, that’s the “brown hydrogen.”

If we want to make hydrogen by electrolyzing water — your audience understands chemistry — the reason there’s still water on the planet is water does not want to be destroyed very easily. It’s a very stable molecule. You have to use lots of energy to get the hydrogen out and that, itself, makes it inherently — not just for the present but for the foreseeable future — far more expensive than natural gas. Until someone discovers a magic catalyst (and I’m not ruling that out!) that can disassociate hydrogen from water in some fashion that is, let’s say, ten times (not 10%) more efficient than electrolysis, that would be a big deal. But that doesn’t exist.

Renewables for heat. . . . Yes, sure, you make electricity with windmills. As long as you’re willing to take your electricity episodically, when the market provides it, and there are some businesses that turn on and turn off, but if you want to store electricity then we’re going to go back into chemistry world that your audience knows lots about.

If you spend ten minutes studying the physical chemistry of batteries, what you learn is that for storing energy, if I have to store energy so I can provide heat when I need it to run a process (especially continuous processes which are very common in heat treatment), storing natural gas as a compressed gas is relatively expensive; you’d rather have a pipe bringing it in. But if you just do it in straight economic terms: how many dollars does it cost to store a therms worth of energy in a compressed gas tank? How many dollars does it cost to store therms worth of energy in a battery? This is easy to figure out: it’s roughly a hundredfold increase in the cost per therm to store energy in a battery versus normal storing it.

Do the batteries get cheaper by a factor of two? Sure, maybe. So, it’s just fifty times more expensive. And will batteries get cheaper? I’m here to make a simple prediction I’ve been making for several years: NO. They’re getting more expensive now because they’re made from materials. Batteries are 60-70% cost denominated by the commodities used to make them and all those commodities are inflating because everybody wants the same commodities: lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel.

DG: Yes, and a lot of that is tied to the mining industry.

MM: A very slow industry to respond. And a challenging industry, to say the least.

DG: And not exactly a lot of stockpiles in the North American area. Most of those mines are Russia, China, . . .

MM: Africa, South America, yes.

Another fact-point: the United States was one of the largest mining regions, on a percentage basis, in the world forty years ago; we produced 90% of the world’s rare earth elements into the late 1990s. We produce nearly none now. But the absolute size of the mining sector in the United States is roughly the same in tons and minerals produced now as it was 30 years ago, but the world uses about three times more stuff. So, our share of mining has not kept up with the growth of our economy or the world’s economy, because it’s a hostile environment to open a mine in. We have lots of minerals. America is a very mineral-rich territory. But this administration just cancelled two mines, one in Minnesota to mine nickel and one in Alaska. So, we’re demanding more minerals and we’re going to be importing them; we are now. At least seventeen critical minerals are 100% imported.

DG: Maybe we ought to add to the old “drill, baby, drill” we ought to add “dig, baby, dig.”

MM: You took the words right out of my report that I wrote on this a year ago.

DG: Last question: Let’s come back to your book. I want to make sure our audience gets a good taste of what they would read in there. The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the New Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Why should they read it?

MM: You asked, “Do I cover materials?” The taxonomy of the book is that everything in society is based on technologies — that’s what civilization is built from. Humans are technology-creating animals; it’s what we do. We invent things, we build tools. But all the technologies fall into sort of three buckets or three spheres. They are one of only three things: It’s about information — acquiring it, moving it, storing it, processing it, technologies for that. The technologies of machines — machines to move, fabricate, control — we build machines. The third sphere is the sphere of materials. You can’t do anything with the machines unless you have materials to make the machines and the materials machines use to make other things. The universe of society is in those three domains.

What I do in my book is map out the changes that are underway — not speculative, not theoretical — but I look at what I call the revolution that’s already happened. What you want to know in order to know what the next 10 years will look like is not what was invented now or last year, but things that were invented 10 or 20 years ago that are just now reaching commercial viability. That would tell you that the tipping point towards these inflections of growth are close to us. That’s much more interesting than saying, “Oh, fusion is around the corner.” No, it’s not. We don’t know when fusion is going to happen. We haven’t invented a commercial machine yet. But if the first commercial fusion machine had been invented, say, 5 years ago, then you could say very different things about fusion in the next decade.

"What I do in my book is map out the changes that are underway — not speculative, not theoretical — but I look at what I call the revolution that’s already happened. What you want to know in order to know what the next 10 years will look like is not what was invented now or last year, but things that were invented 10 or 20 years ago that are just now reaching commercial viability."

So, I look at materials, machines and information through the lens of what has just happened, and then, what does that mean for employment, for entertainment, for education and for healthcare. I sort of map out the four big areas of what we want to do with machines and materials and information, and I map out, first, the revolutions in each of those three spheres where the epicenter of the revolution.

A thread through them all, for the first time, is this thing we call the cloud, which is not a communications tool — it’s a knowledge amplifier that’s democratizing expertise, democratizing skill. If I had said 10 years ago that you’d do a lot of your data information processing (not just storage) in the cloud, every one of the companies in your audience would stare at me doe-eyed and say, “No chance.” They’re all doing it now. You do it day to day when you do Google map or use Airbnb. But every single industry increasingly migrates their knowledge amplification, not just their storage. All of the software they use, not just in the back office, but to run processes. And some of the cloud hardware might be on premise for reasons of security or latency, but it’s still a cloud, the function is the cloud.

I think of the impact of the cloud in the three domains of communications — the cloud is impacting how we can communicate. The cloud is not a communications tool, it uses communications and amplifies it. We’re moving into an era where we have something that is called a materials genome where we can use supercomputers resident in the cloud to do what alchemists have talked about for centuries: Imagine a material, imagine properties you would like, and do experiments that would’ve taken centuries — you can do them hours in supercomputing. But here’s the key, coming back to your world: It not only all takes energy, once the materials are conjured (which took electrical energy to conjure), it then will still take heat to make those materials because nature does not want to give up entropy without you having to expend heat to plight it.

DG: Well, there is hope for us. There is hope for the heat treat world then, that’s for sure.

MM: There’s going to be a lot of heat treating going on for a long time.

DG: Mark, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your expertise. It’s good to talk to you and it’s nice to see you again. I’m sure we’ll stay in touch. Thanks for joining us.

For more information:

Mark Mills Manhattan Institute Profile: www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/mark-p-mills

Mark Mills' The Last Optimist: www.ricochet.com/series/the-last-optimist/

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #73: Energy’s Bright Future with Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #72: All About Heat Treat Boot Camp with Doug Glenn

April 14, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT NEWS INDUSTRIES, HEAT TREAT RADIO

Heat Treat Radio’s editor, Bethany Leone sits down with Heat Treat Today publisher and creator of Heat Treat Boot Camp Doug Glenn to discuss this one-of-a-kind heat treat training event. There’s nothing like it in the North American heat treat industry and you’ll want to send one or more of your people to this entertaining and informative event.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Radio: All About Heat Treat Boot Camp with Doug Glenn

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Bethany Leone (BL): Well, Doug, you get to be on this side of the microphone, which is great to have you at Heat Treat Radio and, of course, as our audience says, you’re always up to something crazy, unconventional, very interesting. So, why don’t you tell us about this Heat Treat Boot Camp that you’re concocting?

Doug Glenn (DG): Yes, thank you, Bethany. It is good to be interviewed by you, too!

Heat Treat Boot Camp is an idea that came about as the result of years and years of being exposed to the industry and knowing that a lot of the new people in the industry, (and also even some people with experience), would really like to know a lot more about the industry without having to spend 5, 6, 7 years just experiencing it, learning ‘on the job,’ if you will. So, the whole idea behind the Heat Treat Boot Camp is to cram 3 to 5 to 7 years’ worth of information into the heads of the attendees of the Heat Treat Boot Camp in a day and a half of classes. So, it is a very condensed tutorial on the North American heat treat market.

BL: I know I am eager to be a part of this and try to glean as much information as I can. Doug, when is it going to be? Have you determined those dates?

DG: Yes, we just signed the contract with the hotel. It will be on October 31^st thru November 2^nd. I do want to emphasize to people that on October 31^st it starts in the evening of October 31^st. That’s an optional reception- you can come, get comfortable in your hotel room, come down and have a few drinks and hors d'oeuvres with the rest of the heat treat community. The real education part starts on Tuesday, November 1^st and we will go a full day. Then, that evening, we will go out and do some sort of special soon-to-be-announced event in the evening where we have a little fun out on the town in Pittsburgh somewhere. Then, we have a half day of classes on Wednesday, with lunch wrapping it up.

We are considering adding a plant tour on Wednesday afternoon. We haven’t determined that yet for sure, but that’s a possibility. Basically, all day Tuesday for classes, half day Wednesday for classes and then you either go home or you decide to go with us on a plant tour, if we end up providing that.

BL: You mentioned a hotel. Are you willing to share which hotel it is or is that going to be a surprise?

DG: No, I did forget to mention it. It’s going to be at the Hotel Double Tree by Hilton Hotel & Suites Pittsburgh Downtown. What’s kind of cool about this is it is right in the shadow of the US Steel Tower building. When you walk out the front door of this hotel, you look up and there is the US Steel Tower building. I think there is no place more appropriate for a heat treat boot camp than right in the shadow of the US Steel Tower. It’s going to be very exciting. It’s a great venue. There are genuinely nice people there and I think everyone should enjoy it.

BL: And you’re talking about speakers, too. Who are these speakers going to be? (I already know one because I’m looking at him.)

DG: Right, most everybody that comes is going to be subject to my speaking, yes. There are going to be about seven different presentations. I think I’ll be doing four and Thomas Wingens from WINGENS LLC International Industry Consultancy out of Sewickley, PA (a suburb of Pittsburgh) will give other more technical talks. I do want to emphasize these talks are not going to be heavily technical. This is really going to be about the players in the industry, (who are the companies in the industry that are making heat treat equipment and/or ancillary products), what are the products, the processes, the markets, and the materials. Those are the five main areas that we’re going to be covering.

BL: You got into this at the beginning, but can you share for our listeners again who exactly is going to benefit? It’s about the basics, but can you get into that a little bit more: maybe the positions that people hold that would want to keep their eye out for this?

DG: Good question. The answer is that it can be anybody that’s in the industry that feels like they need to know more. Ideally, it will probably be new employees who have just recently started in the heat treat industry. Typically, employees of some of our suppliers or employees of commercial heat treaters. It can also be new people in our core market (or our core listeners or readers). Captive heat treaters in the aerospace, automotive, medical and energy markets as well as any other general manufacturing would also benefit from this. But I anticipate a large number of the people who will be attending are those who are suppliers to the industry who want to send their new employees as well as people who may not be so new, but who would like to learn more about the heat treat industry and what it is they’re doing every day. Those are the people.

There is one other audience I will tell you about. We may get some of these people and that is an audience of investors and/or investment bankers, if you will, or lawyers — people who are interested in merges and acquisitions. This would also be an excellent place for them to come to get the lay of the land for the North American heat treat market and who does what. Of course, Thomas and I will be around to answer specific questions if people have specific questions.

BL: It sounds like there’s going to be a lot of people who want to learn something or who are constantly learning and usually trying to navigate, or are in the middle of navigating, that transition.

How is this training going to be different? Very clearly for our listeners, how is this different than any other training offered?

DG: I’ve been in the North American heat treat market for 30+ years now. There is nothing like what we’re going to offer. I know a lot of the different trainings that are out there and there is nothing like Heat Treat Boot Camp. It’s going to be very much basics, but it’s not going to be the basics of metallurgy and heavy in the process information; it’s really going to focus on the commercial side, if you will. You’ll get enough of the technical side. For example, we’re going to explain things like heat — where does it come from, how is it transferred? But we’re not going technical on that. It’s going to be very basic so that everybody can understand. There are two or three places where heat comes from and how it transfers. There are two or three ways that heat transfers from place to place. We’re going to cover some of that.

We’re going to talk about the equipment that is used in the marketplace — everywhere from the most basic box furnace up to some of the most sophisticated type of equipment that’s out there. And how is it used? We’re going to talk about induction heating. We’re going to talk about air and atmosphere furnaces. We’re going to talk about vacuum furnaces. And all the ancillary equipment that goes with it like burners, heating elements, atmosphere, insulation, and refractories. I mentioned atmospheres — either industrial gases and/or on-site generation with endothermic, exothermic, or even on-site hydrogen generation. And we’re going to talk about cooling systems. We’re going to talk about all those things and make sure people know, on a very basic level, what are those things and where they fit into heat treat.

There is no other seminar or webinar like Heat Treat Boot Camp. It is absolutely unique, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve been looking forward to doing this for years and years and I’m hoping it goes well.

BL: That’s great to hear, Doug, and thanks for sharing. So, it’s a lot of the basics. We’re looking at terms. We’re looking at people. We’re looking at the major players, and how everything in heat treat and the industry works together.

Anybody listening? If you are thinking you want to attend, start gathering your questions now because Doug and Thomas will be addressing them coming up this October/November.

How can people sign up or learn a little bit more about Heat Treat Boot Camp? Where can they find information?

DG: It’s very simple. The website is heattreattoday.com/bootcamp. Registration should open early April, so if this is beyond April, it should be there. I would love, love, love to see you there. I think it’s going to be a blast and a really great time, so I’m hoping to see a lot of people.

BL: Thanks for sitting down with us, Doug, and letting me host this episode of Heat Treat Radio.

For more information:

www.heattreattoday.com/bootcamp

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.

Find heat treating products and services when you search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

Heat Treat Radio #72: All About Heat Treat Boot Camp with Doug Glenn Read More »

Heat Treat Legend #71: Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor®

March 24, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

Heat Treat Today publisher and Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, is joined by Dan Herring, known in the industry as The Heat Treat Doctor® of The HERRING GROUP, Inc. In the second installment of a periodic feature called Heat Treat Legends, listen as Dan tells stories from his 50 years of expertise and experience in the industry.

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

HTT · Heat Treat Legend: Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor®

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn: Dan, thank you for joining us. As you know, we’ve spoken before about this: You are actually second on our list of recordings that we’re doing in what we’re calling our Heat Treat Legends podcasts. There were several people that I had at the top of my list — you were one of them. First off, congratulations for being on that list and we’re looking forward to the interview today with you.

Dan Herring: Doug, it’s my pleasure to be here. I just want to say that I consider this a distinct privilege to be considered one of the heat treat legends. But I’d also like to point out to everyone who listens to this that no one individual can do it by themselves. So, I’m accepting this accolade, if you will, on behalf of the many men and women who toiled in, what I’m going to call, relative obscurity and who made this industry what it is today. On their behalf, I’m more than willing to be considered one of the Heat Treat Legends.

DG: Thank you, Dan, that’s very magnanimous of you — that’s very generous and a good way to start and keeps with the character that I know you have.

Let’s go back and talk a little bit about your history, very briefly, to give people a sense of when you started in the industry and your work history. We don’t want to go into too much detail, just where you’ve worked and things of that sort.

First time I met you, Dan, I can still recall it, was in the office of Mr. Ron Mowry at C. I. Hayes and I’m not sure whether it was Warwick or Cranston, Rhode Island, I’m not sure where they were located at the time, but I was a young buck in the industry and went up there with one of my colleagues to visit Ron, and you were there. That’s where I knew you started, where I met you at C.I. Hayes, but there may be time prior to that in the industry where you were already in the heat treat industry. Very briefly, go ahead and give us your history.

DH: First of all, Doug, you’ve got a great memory. I remember meeting you, as well. I’ve been in the industry now a little over 50 years. My working career prior to becoming a consultant in the industry dealt with, or I worked for, three companies and they were furnace manufacturers or, what we call in the industry, original equipment manufacturers. That was Lindberg, which was in the 1970s, C.I. Hayes which was in the 1980s and early 1990s, and then briefly for Ipsen. Then, I "got smart," as the phrase goes, and I saw an opportunity and I formed my own little company called The HERRING GROUP, Inc.

One of the things throughout my career, Doug, that’s rather interesting, is I’ve held an incredible number of different jobs with different responsibilities. I was hired as a corporate trainee by Lindberg. What that meant was that the corporation paid my salary and not the plant, so they were happy to have me, but I was a junior metallurgist who became a metallurgist who ultimately became the chief metallurgist of the organization. Along the way, I worked in engineering, I worked in international marketing, I was a junior application engineer, a senior application engineer, I was a product manager, finally winding up as chief engineer of the company. I joined C.I. Hayes and worked as their corporate metallurgist then became the technical director for the midwestern region of the United States, research and development director at Ipsen, director of new product development.

"My curiosity and interest in science has fueled, if you will, my working career. Metallurgy was once defined to me to be “the chemistry of metals,” which I’ll never forget – I enjoyed that definition." - Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor

So, I’ve done a variety of different tasks. You might say that I’ve been a chief cook and bottle washer of the industry, if you will. But all those tasks, seriously, have taught me what I know today. I learned something from every job I had. Most of my career has been spent “hands-on,” what I mean by that is actively running either heat treat departments, up to a dozen furnaces in the case of Lindberg (there were atmosphere furnaces, there were vacuum furnaces, there were induction heating equipment), running thousands of processes from anything from hardening to enameling. I ran hundreds and hundreds of demonstrations for customers to prove out that the process would work in a particular furnace. I’ve also had the good fortune throughout my career for a period of about 10+ years, I traveled about 15 days a month. To put that in perspective for people, there are only 20 to 22 working days a month. I was visiting customers, visiting manufacturing facilities up to 15 days a month and did that for over 10 years. So, I got to meet quite several people in the industry who, again, shared their experiences and their knowledge. I came across an infinite number of problems in the field that needed solutions, and on and on and on.

Where it began, interestingly enough, and I’m going to put a little call-out here to my parents, that always pushed me to become what I call the best version of myself. My mother was a registered nurse, but I would swear she was an English teacher in disguise; it’s where I learned my love of writing. My father was a machinist — a hands-on guy that ran screw machines. He was one of the most inventive people that I ever met. He was really a good, common-sense individual. And, to horrify the listeners, I’ve been in machine shops since I’ve been six years old. Today, you would never, ever bring a child to work with you and only tell them, “Don’t touch anything and watch yourself.” But anyway, I learned a great deal on the shop floor, so to speak. Then, combined with my education as an undergraduate in engineering and graduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I’ve learned a great deal of my craft from there.

That’s a brief overview of who I am. I’m an equipment guy, I’m a process guy, I’m a hands-on guy, and basically, I’m a problem-solver.

DG: Yes, right. There are two other things, Dan, I’d like to highlight that you’ve humbly left out of your description. One was, back in the day, when I was working for Industrial Heating as their publisher, you and I connected, and you started authoring a monthly column for them for over 10 years, I’m guessing, and had done that for quite some time. Not just because of that, but I would assume somewhat because of that, you heightened yourself as The Heat Treat Doctor®, which you did not mention but I think that’s how you’re really known in a lot of the industry is as The Heat Treat Doctor® from your website and, of course, from some of those columns. I think that’s notable.

And you also did not mention that you are an author of four books: Vacuum Heat Treating Volumes I and II and Atmosphere Heat Treating Volumes I and II, both fairly significant tomes in and of themselves.

DH: Well, thank you, Doug. We’ll talk a little bit more about The Heat Treat Doctor® brand perhaps a little later, but, yes, those are some of the accomplishments on my resume.

DG: Good, good, good.

You mentioned earlier, about some people — you mentioned specifically your parents, which I think was great. It’s very, very interesting, I always find, to see what influence parents have had on people. Is there anyone else you would like to mention that has been significant in the advancement of you and your advancement in the heat treat industry throughout the years?

DH: Well, a few people I think are noteworthy. But I’d like to begin on a rather interesting note. When I was a young boy growing up in Chicago, I want to credit my next-door neighbor, Mr. Joe Pallelo. He happened to be this strange person called a “heat treater.” I didn’t know what he did exactly, but he and my father would spend endless hours either talking between fences or in our yard or in his yard, so I grew up listening to two people talk about heat treating, among other things, which is very unique. Now, truth be told, and I probably shouldn’t admit this but I’m old enough to say it — I was probably more interested in his daughter than I was in him (true story!), but some metallurgy rubbed off along the way.

Also, I think it’s interesting that I have had the extremely good fortune of working for two or three people that actually fell in the genius category. These people were absolutely, positively of genius intellects and they worked within the heat treating industry. At Lindberg, there was a fellow by the name of Hobart Wentworth (aka Bart Wentworth) whose grandfather or great grandfather (I forget which) was actually mayor of Chicago, and he taught me the engineering discipline, if you will. In other words, translating what you learn in university into the real world.

The second one was a guy by the name of Russ Novy. Russ was the chief metallurgist at Lindberg when I started. He was actually a mechanical engineer, of all things, but was one of the smartest and finest metallurgists I ever knew. He had infinite patience, Doug, to tell you what he had learned, and explain things and talk about the root cause of things.

Then, at C.I. Hayes, I must give a shoutout to Herb Western. Herb, still to this day, by the way, holds the record, I believe it’s 300 patents in the state of Rhode Island. The first time I saw Herb he was sitting at this desk fiddling, believe it or not, with typewriter keys. He had a pile of typewriter keys on his desk — he would lift them up and drop them back into the pile, lift them up and drop them back into the pile. Now, I’m a brand-new employee. I’ve been introduced to him — that’s the only thing that stopped him from lifting and dropping typewriter keys. I watched him do this (because my office was right across kitty corner from his) for four days! I’m asking, “What are they paying this guy for?” Then, one day he got up and he walked away from his desk and a little later when I was out in the shop, I noticed that he was building a furnace. He built a furnace; he ran the typewriter keys in that furnace and C.I. Hayes was fortunate enough to get hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of business from this strange company called IBM to [indiscernible] typewrite keys.

"The things you learn in the industry, you must share because you strengthen the industry by doing that, you give the industry a competitive advantage by doing that and you’re helping, in your own small way, to educate the next generation of heat treaters. Because, at the end of your career, I think what you’re going to find is that what is important in our industry is to lead not to follow." -Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor

So, Herb had many, many inventions. He was an extremely creative fella. One more quick story — I don’t know if you want to take the time, but it’s worth it: Herb was the only guy I ever knew that while driving through a car wash got a brilliant idea for load transfer, through and in a furnace, from a car wash. He rode back through the carwash multiple times (of course, with the windows down), looking at the transfer mechanism and then went back to the shop and designed the principal drive system that C.I. Hayes uses to this day.

All in all, I think all the people that I worked with were outstanding. And since my working career ended in the furnace manufacturing, I’ve had a lot of people in the general industry, really contribute to my knowledge and my awareness of the industry. I probably could go on and on and on with people, but I’ll just give a special shoutout to one of them which is Bill Jones who is the CEO of Solar Atmospheres. He taught me quite a few lessons both in business and also from a personal standpoint. I’ve had a whole group of people, Doug, yourself included, that have influenced my life in great ways.

DG: That’s great. You know, Bill Jones, of course, was our first Heat Treat Legend guy, so it’s a good name to mention there.

That’s all very interesting, thank you. When you look back, now, on your career, what would you say, in your humble opinion, are the top two or three most significant accomplishments or achievements that you’ve had?

DH: You mentioned one which was the heat treat books. I’ve had the privilege of writing actually ten books and several of them — six, as a matter of fact — have been in the field of heat treatment. I feel that that’s certainly an accomplishment I’m very proud of. In other words, sharing what I know with others forever, if that makes sense.

The second, of course, is establishing, as you pointed out, The Heat Treat Doctor® brand. I’ll talk a little bit more on that later, perhaps.

The other thing that I guess I would say is that one of the things I’m most proud of accomplishing is doing a lot of good in the industry and doing as little harm to the industry as possible and also helping customers that have critical problems — whether they be in the aerospace industry, the medical industry, the automotive industry — helping them fix their problems and get back in operation again. I’ve been called up at three o’clock in the afternoon and asked, “How fast can you get here? We’ve shut the entire assembly plant down and there are a thousand people on layoff right now. Can you come in and help solve our problems?” That was on a Thursday afternoon, and by Saturday morning, they were back in production. Those are things I’m incredibly proud of. Those are the ones that stand out the most.

DG: Yes, that is impactful when it’s people you’re helping. That’s great.

Look back if you would please, Dan, on your career and say, “What are some of the lessons?” Give us two or three lessons that you’ve learned based on the experiences that you’ve been through.

DH: When I think of what I’ve learned or the lessons that I’ve learned, I think I’ll divide it into two areas: One I’ve learned in business and the second will be what I’ve learned in life. Relative to business, I think the first one is: Be honest. And, of course, be ethical, be fair, try hard, communicate well and have infinite patience. In other words, not everyone understands what you’re saying. You must take the time to explain what you mean to the people you’re dealing with. Although that’s a strange answer on the business side, I think it’s most impactful.

Then, on the life side, my advice would be to enjoy the moment, live in the moment. No matter where you are in the world, no matter what you’re doing, enjoy the moment. I’ll give you one little aside on that: I remember the first day I started to work at Lindberg — I took the train to work, it was right across the street from the train station, I was walking across the street, I was 21-years-old, and I said to myself, “Only 44 years to go.” And I turn around and the 44 years has disappeared like it was yesterday. So, you must enjoy what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life.

The other thing I would say is to never sacrifice family for work. Never, ever. I made myself a promise as a young man after missing a couple of my oldest son’s birthdays that I would never miss another birthday of his in my life, and I’m proud to say I haven’t. But I think that’s an important life lesson, as well.

DG: Yes, that’s good.

Were there any disciplines? You kind of mentioned a couple here, but were there any disciplines, whether they be life-general or work-specific, that you established during your work career you think have treated you well? Things that you’ve said, “This is a discipline I’m going to do every day, every week” or whatever it is. Is there anything along that line that you can remember?

DH: Well, I have two passions in life right now. From the time I was old enough to remember, I had a passion for science, chemistry, in particular. My curiosity and interest in science has fueled, if you will, my working career. Metallurgy was once defined to me to be “the chemistry of metals,” which I’ll never forget – I enjoyed that definition. My other great passion in life is mathematics. I think that the logical thinking and the problem-solving aspects of that discipline stand out to me as something that help every day.

DG: You mentioned earlier, just briefly, about not missing your son’s birthdays and things of that sort, which makes me wonder about this question which I’ve asked before in other interviews and that is: How about work-life balance? Any tips for people? I, personally, find it difficult to turn off the work at five or six o’clock, sometimes. Any guidance or any suggestions for work-life balance?

DH: First of all, Doug, that’s a hell of a question to ask a workaholic! Howsoever, absolutely, positively, there is a life-work balance. It’s different for each individual person. I will simply share mine and that is the fact that I have the unique ability, once the workday ends (and the workday may be 12+ hours), but once the workday ends, I can immediately transition into relaxation and “fun mode,” as I call it, without one thought about work. The thinking about work maybe creeps in when, finally, about midnight you’ve gone to bed or about 4:00 a.m. when you wake up, but the idea is the fact that I have real quality time to enjoy family and friends and pursue some of my nonwork passions. I don’t know if I should mention these; I mentioned mathematics, but I enjoy poetry and critical thinking, and those are hobbies of mine.

DG: Do you find those hobbies to be exceptionally helpful to you in the sense of giving you a mental break from what you do? Does it make you a better metallurgist, a better engineer?

DH: Yes. I really believe — and this is where that work-life balance comes in — you have to get away from it, whether it be five minutes or five days, you have to get away from it so you can come back to it refreshed and ready to go.

DG: Yes. There is a concept out there about what they call “focused thinking” and there is “diffused thinking.” A lot of times when you’re focused on something and you’re thinking and you just can’t get it, you get away for a while. You’re in the shower or you’re sleeping at night and suddenly, boom — there it is! It comes to you because you weren’t focused on it, you were diffused. You were out doing something else and all of a sudden, the genius moment comes.

DH: I will warn people: Don’t shave when the genius moment comes! It can be a life altering experience. It did happen to me, but that’s another story for another day.

DG: Well, that maybe ties into this next question and that is this: This is maybe a little bit more of a serious question because, you know, life is not, as they say, all a bed of roses. What was the most trying time for you in your work career (whatever you’re comfortable saying) and coming out the other side and looking back, are there any lessons you would have learned from that?

DH: I think one of the things that I think people will find to be a little bit unique, is that in my professional career, I’ve had very few trying times. Yes, I’ve had insanely tight deadlines, horrible/horrific travel schedules, getting to a hotel at three o’clock in the morning when you’ve got to get up at six and go visit a customer (we’ve all been there), and trying to temper customer expectations from “the want” to “the need,” if you will. Those are trying professional times.

But some of the work lessons that I’ve learned from that is that not everyone brings the same intensity or focus to a project as you do. Everyone is not as dedicated, and I want to not say “driven” because a lot of people are, but I hold myself to a high standard and as a result of that, you must learn to temper it down, to use a heat treat term. You have to learn to make sure that the recipient of the knowledge is receptive to the knowledge. I’m very much “old school,” although you’d never guess that from looking at me, but my word has always been my bond. I was taught long ago — if you say it, do it. If you don’t want to do it, don’t say it!

So, yes, I can handle pressure, I can handle a tremendous amount of stress, and I don’t view work as work, I view it as just a true labor of love. But all of that, my personality and all my experiences and all the help I’ve been given through the years, have blunted what you’d call “trying times.” I’m very fortunate in that sense.

DG: That is a blessing, honestly. I don’t know that there are a lot of people that could say that. Most people, I would think, if I asked what the most trying time is, something immediately pops into their head. So, that’s very fortunate, it really is.

Let’s flip that question on its head though: If you can think of one most exhilarating time, what would it be? What was the peak of your career?

DH: Again, I’m probably going to give you a very nonconventional answer. And I will also make the comment that this is, perhaps, a little bit of a sexist comment, as well, but I have to say it: I’m lying in bed one evening with my wife many years ago and I do a “sit up” — “I’ve had that “genius moment” and I said, “Oh my God, I’ve got it: The heat treat doctor!” Now, my wife, who’s semi asleep at this moment in time when I have my eureka moment, glances over at me and says, “Now that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” She rolls back over and goes to sleep. Well, it took me quite a while to get back to sleep. But, anyway, now we’re laying in bed about ten years later and she says to me, “You know, I was wrong. That heat treat doctor idea is really something.” And I’m lying there, Doug, and I’m going — I can count on one hand the number of times in life a man has ever heard a woman say, “I was wrong.” So, although I wanted to do a fist pump, I restrained myself, I lay there in bed basking in the glow of masculine superiority for all of about 30 seconds and then it’s business back as usual.

This is not a personal accolade here but establishing The Heat Treat Doctor® brand has brought heat treating into the forefront of manufacturing, into the forefront of the industry, into the forefront of engineering, that, yes, there is something called heat treating and it is a solution to your needs. So, I view the brand as not so much a personal accomplishment as an industry accomplishment.

DG: Yes. Well, again, I think you’re being modest, because if I can just interject here: You know The Heat Treat Doctor® idea was good, as has proven out to be the case, but there could be other people who would’ve come up with that and it would not have been as successful. Personally, Dan, I think that the reason that is the case with you, specifically, is because of your relatively unique skillset, which you’ve mentioned and I’m just going to highlight here a little bit.

I think you said it was your mother who taught you “all things words” and English and grammar and things of that sort. It’s a unique skillset to have someone who is knowledgeable about engineering, knows what they’re talking about and can do two additional things besides just knowing the engineering: One, they’re patient enough (as you’ve mentioned in an example of someone you’ve talked about) to be able to spend time to explain it, but secondly, they’re good at explaining it. Some people are just not good teachers. You capture all three of those elements, if you will, “the engineering knowhow”: the ability and patience to teach and the ability to explain things well. I think that’s why The Heat Treat Doctor® has worked for you and worked very well.

DH: I think that’s the case, Doug, and I agree.

DG: Last question for you, because I always like to go away and depart on a question of: You know, you’re an old-timer, right? (Not by my assessment but by your own statement. I still think you have a lot of years left here and we look forward to those.) But what kind of advice would you give to the younger people? You know, Heat Treat Today does 40 Under 40 — we’ve done three or four years of that, so we’ve got either 120 or 160 young people under the age of 40. Hearing advice from those more senior in the industry can be helpful. Are there any pieces of advice you would give to those young people?

"The idea being the fact that soap is your friend, soap is not your enemy. Get out there, do good and do work with your hands, contribute to your science and you will be a success."

DH: Yes. It’s a very, very good question. The thing that comes to mind first, and this is perhaps difficult for younger people to understand, but you have to share your knowledge openly and without reservation. Now, I’m not saying give away company secrets. The things you learn in the industry, you must share because you strengthen the industry by doing that, you give the industry a competitive advantage by doing that and you’re helping, in your own small way, to educate the next generation of heat treaters. Because, at the end of your career, I think what you’re going to find is that what is important in our industry is to lead not to follow. In other words, heat treating has to be the most cost-competitive industry or we will cease to exist.

An example I use, and everyone under 40 won’t understand this but I beg you to try: When I was a young man, there was something in this world called the slide rule. We could do marvelous engineering calculations with nothing more than a slide rule. Well, the slide rule is a thing of the past. It’s a device that works perfectly fine, but who would ever use it over a calculator or a computer? It’s a product that’s obsoleted itself. We cannot let our industry obsolete itself.

Another piece of advice is: Don’t worry what people say, what they do or what they think. Do good, contribute to your science and grow the industry. I guarantee you that at the end of your careers, you will feel like you’ve never really worked a day in your life.

The last piece of advice would be to emphasize: Be a hands-on engineer. Be a hands-on person. This is from my father, of course: Look at the practical side of things, the practical skills, the common sense that it takes to do our jobs. And don’t be afraid to go out there and get your hands dirty — soap was invented specifically for that purpose.

If I can indulge and give one last story (I’m all about telling stories with morals). I always have a bar of Lava soap in the bathroom so when I come in from working outside, I can wash my hands. I was out with the grandson one day a few years ago and we went into the house, and we went in the bathroom to wash our hands, and he took one look at that Lava soap, and he said, “Boy, does that taste bad.” And I’m thinking how would he know what Lava soap tastes like if his father hadn’t washed his mouth out with it? The idea being the fact that soap is your friend, soap is not your enemy. Get out there, do good and do work with your hands, contribute to your science and you will be a success.

DG: Thanks, Dan, so much. I appreciate the time you’ve invested, not just with us here today, but for the 50 some years you’ve put into the industry. It’s been a great pleasure knowing you and working with you. We look forward to doing more with you here at Heat Treat Today, but thanks for all the very, very positive contributions you’ve made to the industry. We appreciate your time.

DH: Doug, it’s my pleasure and thank you for doing this. I think it’s going to be a tremendous service to the industry.

DG: Thank you.

For more information:

www.heat-treat-doctor.com

dherring@heat-treat-doctor.com

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio and look in the list of Heat Treat Radio episodes listed.

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Heat Treat Legend #71: Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor® Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #70: Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today – Heat Treatment vs. Thermal Processing

March 10, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, and several other Heat Treat Today team members sit down with long-time industry expert Dan Herring, the Heat Treat Doctor®, to discuss the difference between heat treating and thermal processing. If you’ve ever wondered about the difference – if one actually exists(!), then you’ll enjoy this highly informative Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today.

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

Heat Treat Today &ndash; Heat Treatment vs. Thermal Processing" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/721399350?h=6bec02a44d&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">

HTT · Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today – Heat Treatment vs. Thermal Processing

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG): So, Dan, I want to turn it over to you, but I want to give a context though of what we’re going to be talking about. As you just mentioned, before we hit the record button, we’re pretty heat treat centric in our world, but there are a lot of other thermal processes that go on that aren’t exactly heat treat. We talk about some of them in our publication, not all, so what we’d like to do is turn over to you to talk about the difference between “heat treating proper” and “thermal processing, generally speaking.”

Dan, welcome and thanks for educating us.

Dan Herring (DH): Well, thanks, Doug, and good afternoon, everybody. First of all, for everyone listening, I hope to cover the basics providing information without confusing everyone. If there are any questions as I go along, please don’t hesitate to ask them. I think it’s always better to have an interactive, back and forth discussion on things.

You are absolutely correct, Doug. we live in a heat treat centric world. I’m going to start off in familiar territory by discussing a little bit about heat treating. Then, we’re going to move into the differences between heat treating and thermal processing.

To give a simple definition of heat treating — simple yet complicated at the same time — is heat treating is the controlled application of time, temperature and atmosphere to produce a predictable change in the internal structure (that means the microstructure to metallurgists) of the material being treated. Now, the interesting part is that heat treating is (a) predictable, which is why metallurgists exists in the world and it is (b) controlled, which is why heat treaters exist in the world, and the darndable thing about heat treating is that it happens inside the metal or the material and, unfortunately, you (c) can’t see the changes that are taking place.

Let me give you an example, if I can: I’ll hold this up; I don’t know if people can see it that well, but what this is is a helicopter transmission gear. And if we were manufacturing this particular gear, one of the things we would do to measure, if we were successful or to see if we were successful, is to measure the dimensions of the gear that we were actually taking and manufacturing. But in the world of heat treating, because the changes happen inside the material, it’s very difficult to know if the part is good or not. But heat treating has the ability, as we say, to vary the mechanical properties, the physical properties and the metallurgical properties of a material. The problem is that we can change them either for the better or, as most heat treaters know, we can change them for the worst. That’s why there is something called quality control and quality assurance. But I’m drifting away from the main point.

In the world of heat treating, with that definition — the controlled application of time, temperature and atmosphere to produce the predictable change in the internal structure of a material — not only are we heat treat centric in this industry, but we are also often steel or iron and steel centric in this industry. Metallurgists tend to be either ferrous metallurgists (specializing in irons and steels) or nonferrous metallurgists, specializing in things called aluminum, or as the British and Europeans would say, “aluminium,” titanium, and some of the super alloys and things of this nature. The idea being the fact that there are a lot of different materials that can be heat treated.

We often limit ourselves, if you will. But there are parts of our industry that heat treat: for example, precious metals — the golds, the silvers, the platinums and things of this nature. There are also parts of our industry that deal with copper and brass. There are parts of our industry that deal with ceramics which deal with powder metal, if you will. So, one of the things as heat treaters we must remember is that even under just the heat treat umbrella, there are a lot of different disciplines out there. There are a lot of things that we cover, and we look at. There are a lot of different materials that are processed. And again, we think, in general, as heat treaters and probably incorrectly so, we think about what are called “semifinished goods.” What we think about are parts that are manufactured from steel, aluminum, titanium, copper or powder metal. We think of automotive parts, aerospace parts. We think of something like weapons or military equipment, ammunition, firearms. We think of agricultural products, farm implement products and things of this nature. So, one of the things we must be aware of is that there is a whole world outside of our comfort zone, and that is something that we’re going to explore today.

Before I go on, does that make sense to everyone, or does anyone have any questions about the heat treatment side of what we do?

"Heat treating is the controlled application of time, temperature and atmosphere to produce a predictable change in the internal structure (that means the microstructure to metallurgists) of the material being treated." - Dan Herring

DG: No, I think that makes sense. You mentioned on the inside of the part that things can’t be seen so much. You will probably get to this Dan, but I assume that also includes surface treatments, or would that be something different?

DH: We’ll talk a little bit about the difference between surface treatments and they fall into an area probably referred, in general, as “coatings” and things of this nature. But that is a good question, Doug- plating and coating and things of this nature.

Also, one of the things about heat treating that seems a little bit, possibly confusing is that heat treaters consider processes like brazing (which is a joining process), and they think of soldering (which is a low temperature joining process), as heat treatments. Similarly, we think of sintering, and we think of heat treatments of powder metal products, or we think of powder metallurgy as falling under the subject of heat treatment because we think so much about sintering. But sintering is a bonding or a diffusion process. So, heat treaters think of heat treatment, they think of brazing, and they think of powder metallurgy all combined into that big umbrella. For any brazers who are listening, or any powder metal people who are listening — they probably died of cardiac arrest at this moment in time — but, in general, that’s what heat treating does: it considers those separate entities as part of it.

Let’s go on and look at the fact that I can say to you — automotive components, gears, bearings, aerospace components, landing gear transmission boxes, fasteners, screws, nuts, bolts, farm implement equipment -- those are things that commonly come to mind. People don’t often think, for example though, of things like jewelry which is something that is commonly heat treated or “processed,” if you will, more on the thermal processing side. A lot of electronic materials are also thermally processed, and a lot of castings and things done in the foundry industry.

But, as I said, we think of semifinished goods where a semifinished goods-centric/heat treat-centric world; but there are other worlds out there. Let’s kind of talk about them. But mill practices, or what we call “primary metals,” are another area that’s covered, interestingly enough, under heat treating. Because in steel mills and things of this nature, you’ll find soaking pits, for example. In aluminum processing facilities or aluminum foundries, you might find solution heat treating and aging ovens and things of this nature. So, there is, in a very broad or general sense, heat treating also done on the mill or the material production side of things. Again, unless we’re in that industry, we don’t tend to think about it that much. So, we have to.

But, if I also said to you that things like cosmetics are being processed, not heat treated, but thermally treated, if you will. Or things like cement, or minerals in raw ore, ore materials and things- these all fall in the category of now “thermal processing.”

Let me try to give everybody just a feel for what the different categories of thermal processing are. The number one category, of course, is heat treatment. There is another thermal process . . . . And, by the way, thermal processes are also confused a little bit because we use heat, or we use cold — those are both thermal processes. For all the heat treaters out there, we do things like deep freezing, and we do things like cryo-treatments, cryogenic treatments. Those fall under the umbrella of heat treating. But there are other deep cooling or cooling processes that fall under this umbrella of thermal processing.

Besides heat treatment, thermal processing consists of a few areas which you are maybe familiar with and then again maybe you’re not that familiar with. One of them is calcining which I often call the drying of powders, if you will. This can be in the form of ores, it can be in the form of minerals, it can be in the form of coke (which is a coal byproduct, if you will), it can be in the form of cement. So, there are drying processes that occur under thermal treatment which is in the area of calcining.

There is also a big category called fluid heating where what we’re doing, (and by the way, air is a fluid as well as water and liquids are fluids), so we can turn around and do things like chemical processing which is done at elevated temperature. I had a client that was producing mayonnaise and the mayonnaise has held at 180 degrees Fahrenheit- it is a thermal process, if you will.

Distillation. We won’t talk about alcohol much in the world. I will only comment that all of you think this is a bottle of water, but you could be mistaken about that.

The idea is that fact that fluid heating, calcining, drying, smelting, metal heating in general, curing and forming — which is done a lot on ceramics, on paints, paint drying and things of this nature. There is, just in general, other methods of heating. I’ll give you a simple example: waste incineration. We know that our trash is burned at ultra-high temperatures to reduce emissions, if you will, but avoid going into landfills or, worse yet, dumping it in the ocean and believing that somehow it won’t return to our ecosystem. But incineration is an example of a thermal process.

There are quite a number; there are literally hundreds of thermal processes that are occurring all the time that we don’t, in general, think very much about. Heat treating is typically divided into two general categories — processes that soften a material and processes that harden a material. So, in the category of softening, we think of things like aging, we think of things like annealing, we think of things like normalizing, or even stress relieving (in other words, taking the stress out of material is a softening process).

DG: Tempering, as well, Dan? Would it be in that?

DH: Well, tempering, in a sense, could be considered a softening process. It’s a good one. I consider it more a softening process than a hardening process, but it’s typically so intimately linked with hardening that people think of it as a hardening process. But, hardening and case hardening, austempering, and then, of course, brazing which is a joining process, soldering, sintering which is a bonding process, homogenizing (when we talk about aluminum), solution treating (when we talk about aluminum). Solution treating is not a hardening process, interestingly enough- it’s the aging or the precipitation hardening process after the solution heat treatment that is actually the hardening process.

The idea of the fact is that we’re very familiar with those terms; we’re less familiar with coke ovens or waste incinerators or distilling facilities, or things of this nature. We’re not used to processing resins or composite materials, even though there are autoclaves that use a combination of high pressure and temperature to form some of the composite materials that are used in the aerospace industry.

The way I like to think about it is there is a giant umbrella which is called thermal processing. Under that umbrella is a small segment, maybe not so small, called heat treating, and then heat treating is divided into semifinished goods and raw materials (or primary goods), and then it’s subdivided into irons and steels and nonferrous alloys. Now, in my day, when you graduated university, you graduated with a degree in metallurgy. Today, you become a material scientist which means that you’re dealing with composites, ceramics, electronic materials, a whole series of materials outside the realm of just iron and steel and aluminum and titanium, if you will.

The other thing that’s very interesting about our industry, in general, is probably the aspect of energy usage. The thermal processing industry, in general, and this is a rather stunning number, uses, in round numbers, about 38% of the energy produced in the United States. Now think about that as a number. Of all the energy consumed by people in the U.S. or in Canada or in Mexico or anywhere else in the world, two-thirds of it or greater — 40% of it, almost — is used in thermal processing. About 25% is used by transportation, and another 20% or so is used by residential. Then, there’s about 15% used in, what we call, “other” category. But, in thermal processing, which is also true in heat treating, about 80% of the energy comes from natural gas. And only 15%, (round numbers), comes from electricity.

We have to realize that we’re not only, as heat treaters “heat treat-centric,” “iron and steel-centric,” “aluminum-centric,” but we’re also “natural gas-centric.” Those are staggering numbers to consider. The reason for it, the reason we’re natural gas centric, not only in the heat-treating industry but in the thermal processing industry as a whole, is simply because natural gas is the cheapest energy source available right now. And, these numbers, although they apply specifically to North America, can also apply, if you will, to the world in general. The numbers vary a little bit throughout the world, they may be different in Europe and different in Asia, but not so much that it varies so greatly.

What I’ve tried to cover — and I realize I haven’t left a lot of room for questions here and I apologize for that — but I’ve tried to give you the idea that heat treating is a very important part of a much larger industry that services the manufacturing community.

Let’s open for discussion from anybody.

Dan Herring and the **Heat Treat** **Today** team: Karen Gantzer, Bethany Leone, Doug Glenn, Dan Herring, Evelyn Thompson, and Alyssa Bootsma

DG: That sounds good. Do any of you have questions, at all?

Alyssa Bootsma: I did have one. I think it was very helpful in understanding everything and the idea that thermal processing is an umbrella and heat treatment is just a part of that really clicked for me. I was wondering if you could talk about calcining a little bit more and what that process actually is.

DH: Sure. But before I do that, I want to mention one thermal process that I forgot to mention. Because I have a number of clients that work in the baking of cookies, and because I’ve consumed a few of those in my life, I don’t want to forget the baking industry.

DG: The brewing industry?

DH: Absolutely! By the way, the brewing hall of fame is located here in Chicago, unless I’m grossly mistaken.

Before we get to far afield, let’s talk about calcining a little bit. A number of powders, whether they be ores or whether they be things like cement or various minerals, are often processed in, what we call, a slurry. They’re processed in a form in which they are either cleaned or washed with water or with different chemicals. As a result, you have a wet mixture of a mineral and, let’s say, water, or in some cases they can be different chemicals, if you will, that go to either clean the minerals or dilute the minerals or things of this nature. But to go to further processing of those minerals, you have to dry them and put them into a form that they can be used. If this makes any sense, then let’s take cement as an example. It’s no good to keep the cement in a slurry because what’s going to happen to the cement? It’s going to dry and harden. So, what you have to do to send it to the consumers is you have to dry the powder, if you will, deliver it to the end-user who will then add liquid to it to once again form it or turn it into liquid cement. Calcining, is really, in simplest terms, to answer the question directly, I always consider it, a powder-drying process.

DG: Dan, any idea why they call it “calcining?” I’ve always wondered this.

DH: Well, in the old days, I believe that limestone, (which is calcium carbonate), and so "calcining" and "calcium" from the calcium carbonate, I think that’s where the name originally came from. A good thing to look up, however- that’ll be my homework assignment.

DG: There you go. Just as another example of a thermal process, it’s certainly not heat treat, just down the road from where I live, north of Pittsburgh, they have a lot of sand and gravel places. Believe it or not, there is a large, what I would call a, horizontally-oriented “screw furnace” — it’s a cylinder and it just rotates, and inside it’s heated up and they’re just simply burning off the moisture so that they can get the materials, or whatever it is they’re harvesting out of the earth, and get it down to a certain level of moisture so that they can process it. So, sand and gravel. That’s just another area.

Here's another one — and Dan, I want you to hit on glass if you don’t mind, in a minute — but here’s another one where thermal processing is used, which you might not think of, and that’s in the manufacturing of paper production. They’ve got to actually dry the paper and you wouldn’t think of it but they’re passing paper through flame (between flames, not actually in the middle of the flames) simply to dry paper before it goes onto these huge rolls.

One last comment, Dan: We often talk about energy intensity and how much energy it actually takes to perform a certain process. One of the highest thermally intense processes that is used is not so much a heat treatment, but it is actually the manufacturing of concrete, believe it or not. There is very, very high energy intensity — it takes a lot of gas, in this case, to produce concrete.

But Dan, if you don’t mind, could you hit on glass production? We’re all looking out windows here and the manufacturer of glass is a thermal process.

DH: Absolutely it is. But before I do that, quickly, that rotary drum that you saw, the one with the screw inside it, if you will, that helps move the powder, if you will, or the sand and gravel through, is a very typical calcining furnace. Rotary drums are also used in the heat treatment industry to process screws and fasteners, nuts and bolts, small products, if you will, typically.

But yes, paper is a good example but glass furnaces, too, where the glass is actually brought up and the sand and other elements, if you will, are melted into glass. Very disconcerting. You may find this interesting but roughly the walls on a glass furnace (I’ve seen 10-20,000-pound glass furnaces) are something like 4 inches thick, holding back all that molten glass. But again, you’re taking glass that is basically silicone dioxide, its sand is a major component of it. In colored glasses, you add different chemicals. Like, for example, if you want to form a bluish colored glass, you might add a copper oxide, for example, which will change or tint the glass to a different color.

You’ve heard of leaded glasses, for example. In the old days you added lead to glass to make it, again, more formable, if you will. But yes, glass furnaces or the manufacture and production of glass is very energy intensive, as well as cement, as is the production of aluminum, by the way, which basically uses electricity, which is why all of the aluminum facilities are located either near hydroelectric or thermal energy like in Iceland, for example, where you have geothermal energy which is used to heat and produce electricity. But yes, glass is definitely an example of a thermal process, as well.

Glass is interesting because we don’t necessarily do a lot of heat treatment of glass, but you may have heard of glass-to-metal sealing, where we’re actually taking a glass and sealing it into or onto a metal component. Like, for example, the site ports of burners where we look in to see the flame — those site ports are made by glass-to-metal sealing. But, in general, yes, melting and production of glass is a thermal process.

DG: Dan, correct me if I’m wrong, and I could be wrong on this, but cellphones, right? Your glass on the front of that — the reason it is actually quite strong and won’t break is because it’s been thermally processed, a tempering process of some sort, I believe. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it the thermal process that can make a glass really, really difficult to break?

DH: It is, plus the fact that glass is a quasi-solid, as we say. It’s a solid but it’s really not; it has more characteristics of a liquid, which, again, makes it more ductile or resistant to things It makes it more shock absorbing, for example. But yes, cellphones and cellphone glass are something I’ve got to do some more research on.

DG: Right. They’ve got some stuff called “gorilla glass.”

I just want to recap a couple things for our team here and for other people that might be listening: When we talk about heat treat, which is what we’re centered on, it’s helpful for us to know what processes, materials and things that includes, and what processes and materials that doesn’t include, and that’s why this conversation on thermal processing versus heat treat is helpful for us. The way I like to describe it to our team and to most of the people who would be reading our publication or listening to this podcast, is typically Heat Treat Today is not involved with the making of steel but almost everything else after the making of steel we would deal with, almost everything. So, we don’t really do the steel making. Steel making, however, is very much a thermal process but we just don’t cover it. There are other publications that cover that. And we are very much steel-centered; we do aluminum, as well. However, in the aluminum world, we actually do deal with aluminum making. For reasons that basically have to do with the temperature range: the temperature range isn’t quite as high with aluminum making as it is with steel making. So, we do some of that. We don’t do a lot with aluminum making but a lot after aluminum is made. We do a lot of the homogenizing, annealing, solution heat treating and that type of stuff.

So, that is us. In heat treating, we define things like brazing, even though it’s a joining process, we tend to cover it. Soldering we don’t tend to cover because it tends to be a lower temperature. Dan didn’t mention it, but I’m sure he would, is welding: it’s a joining process but it’s not exactly anything we cover either. It’s not what we consider to be heat treating.

There is another joining process that we didn’t cover, and maybe we could hit on it briefly next time, and that is diffusion bonding which, to be quite honest with you, I haven’t done a lot of study on it so it would be interesting to know what that is. I know it’s done in vacuum and under high pressures, I believe, but things of that sort.

At any rate, that what’s we mean when we talk about heat treat — it’s primarily steels, aluminums, titaniums and typically not steelmaking and probably not titanium making either, but aluminum making and everything downstream from that tends to be us, and our temperature ranges tend to be, very generally speaking, 800 degrees Fahrenheit and above, or as Dan mentioned, we can also do some things in the cryogenic range which are subzero temperatures. So, that is us. Everything that falls outside of that we would consider to be a thermal process, which is a lovely thing, but just not our cup of tea.

DH: Look at this, Doug, a whole new business opportunity for you. With that, I’m extending myself beyond metallurgy, so I’ll quit there.

DG: Dan, we really appreciate it. We look forward to more of these. We are going to try to do other topics, again, what I would call heat treat 101 type topics, our Lunch & Learn series with Dan Herring, The Heat Treat Doctor®. Dan, thanks a lot, we appreciate your time.

DH: A pleasure, everyone. Thank you.

For more information:

www.heat-treat-doctor.com

dherring@heat-treat-doctor.com

Doug Glenn Publisher Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio .

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Heat Treat Radio #70: Lunch & Learn with Heat Treat Today – Heat Treatment vs. Thermal Processing Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #69: Robotics in Heat Treat, a Conversation With Dennis Beauchesne, ECM-USA

February 24, 2022 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO

Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, discusses the current state of robotics in the North American (and European) heat treat markets with ECM-USA, Inc. managing director, Dennis Beauchesne. Find out where robotics is currently being used as well as some future applications.

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

HTT · Robotics in Heat Treat, a Conversation with Dennis Beauchesne, ECM-USA

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG): Dennis, thanks for joining us. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked about finally getting together on Heat Treat Radio to have a conversation about some interesting things. Today, we’re going to talk to Dennis Beauchesne of ECM USA about robotics. Dennis, welcome. I appreciate you joining us.

Dennis Beauchesne (DB): Well, Doug, thank you very much for having me on. We’ve been talking about it for quite a while and I’m really glad we could finally get our schedules together to make this happen.

DG: We’re recording just after the holidays. Both of us are sobered up and back to be able to think clearly. We do want to talk about robotics, but just to give the listeners and/or viewers a sense of Dennis Beauchesne, your background, just briefly, tell us where you’ve come from and how long you’ve been working in the North American heat treat market.

DB: My name is Dennis Beauchesne. I am the general manager of ECM USA which is the U.S. subsidiary of ECM Technologies working out of France. I’ve been with ECM Technologies for almost 21 years. About 10 years before that I also worked with other furnace companies and some in the heat treat business as well as selling alloy baskets, fans, and those kinds of things. I also had a rep organization for 3 years where I sold probes and a number of other heat treat-related items. I’ve had my share of crawling around furnace and heat treats and getting to know the applications, loading mechanisms and all or most of the processes. I’m certainly not an expert on a lot of the heat treat processes, but one, in particular (low pressure vacuum carburizing and especially with gas quenching) is something that I’ve been working with for over 20 years, but certainly hardening and other applications, as well, and vacuum furnaces is our forte.

DG: Based on conversations you and I have had in the past, we started talking about robotics. It’s almost an element of Industry 4.0 to a certain extent- augmented reality, virtual reality, and things of that sort. Robotics definitely fits into that some, let’s talk about that a little bit.

From your perspective, what is ECM seeing as far as the use of robotics. I’m curious about industry in general, but if you want to narrow it down also and talk a little bit about where are you currently seeing robotics used in heat treat, that would be great.

DB: Robotics, in general, and automation. Automation has always been a leading technology for ECM USA and ECM Technologies, worldwide. A lot of our vacuum furnaces, as you know, are large scale, high production equipment as well as single chamber systems. But automation usually plays a part in our offering, and that, before, was conveyers, walking beam tables, rolling tables and those kinds of things, where we automated the process so that you would have, obviously, time control over the process, when the parts went to temper, etc.

What we’re seeing more and more, and the reason that I’m here today, is that ECM is very much involved with the robotics handling of parts before and after heat treatment as well. We’ve come across quite a few applications in the industry where these are required. You and I were just at some recent fall meetings, and labor availability is the number one issue in the world today, as we know. I really feel that robotics can do a lot to help in that area. Where we’ve seen robotics work is loading/unloading alloy fixtures, loading/unloading CFC fixtures, taking parts out of bins and putting them in heat treat fixtures, and then you have either operators move them to the furnaces or load them automatically through the automation system (conveyers, walking beams, etc.). We’ve done those systems, especially in Europe, we’ve done a number of systems there.

We are installing a system here, this summer, in North America, and it will be fully robotic-integrated. So, the customer brings us parts that will be in particular totes and we would be loading them into CFC fixtures. The fixtures will be retained in the heat treat area and then the parts will be unloaded after heat treat and then loaded back into their bins, totes, or containers.

This is a fully, completely automated process. It’s not that it’s the same part every time; there are actually 175 different parts. I think that’s a really important piece of information. And they’re not all gears, they’re not all shafts; there is a mixture of a bunch of different parts. It’s a very challenging application but also one that, with today’s technology in robotic vision systems, is a doable situation. We’re looking forward to showing off more of that.

DG: And that was one of my questions, especially when you mentioned 175 different types of parts. Is the system that you’re speaking about or are the systems that can be made by ECM or others, I assume they are going to use vision recognition, right? They’re not just going to say, “Well, I’m going to take my robotic arm and I’m going to this position where they tell me there is this type of part,” or is that arm actually going to be able to say, “That’s that type of part, therefore I treat it thusly.”

DB: I would say in this application, if people saw the loading/unloading, they would say, “Well, of course, the part’s going to be in the same location, it’s going to be in the same tote, it’s going to be in the same plastic locking device that it’s going to be every time.” This is true and it is very true in this application.

I think that’s one of the things that’s a challenge in the heat treat business, especially for heat treaters, not the captive operations but even in captive operations, is that parts come in in different forms- they’re in bins, they’re in tins, they’re in bins with plywood covers or plywood covers with cardboard covers, with bubble wrap, and all the things that you see across the marketplace.

As you mentioned, vision is a big, big part of robotics. Actually has some eyes for the robot to know there’s no part there, I’m not going to go get it, I change my program, I go here, or I twist the wrist of the robot a different way to pick up that part, whether it’s flat or round or whatever. Vision plays a big part. The advancements in vision and the robotics are huge, and have been huge, as they have been in vacuum furnace technology, as well, and gas quenching. Those things, moving forward, are a lot of the part of research and development at ECM and ECM USA. Things are moving forward.

DG: Before we get too deep into what, exactly, these robots are and how they work, I want to question you about the motivation for why people are using them. You mentioned about labor shortage being one of the main reasons. I’m assuming that there are some benefits there. Are these robots replacing people or are they assisting people? What do you see?

DB: I think it’s across the board for both. You are replacing people but not really replacing people that aren’t present. That’s part of the labor shortage is you don’t have people to replace. That’s part of the situation. We’re really adding to the capability, or the versatility, of that heat treat shop or captive heat treat by adding a robot or adding a person, if you want to look at it that way. But they’re also working together with the people, on the line or in the heat treat, to assist them.

You could have a robot that merely lifts a bin and moves it to another location where you’re helping a person not having to pick up such a heavy load. You also have robots that are placing parts precisely in a fixture or placing parts precisely in a bin, whereas the quality of that part is not impaired: you’re not dropping it or you’re not scratching it along with another part, you’re moving it very carefully like a customer would want to handle that particular part with higher quality.

I think, what was best taken from one of our fall sessions was that one of the presenters, [who] indicated they were using robots, said that in their process they were using this robot to do some of the heat treat and they said that they really no longer can do that heat treat process any more with a human because the robot was so precise at getting them heat correctly on that part for what they were doing. In that way, you are increasing the quality and the value of your heat treat and the robot integration.

DG: Right. The repeatability is the issue and the real advantage there: precise placement and processing of that item which even the best of us humans can’t do.

Realistically speaking, from ECM’s perspective, can you give us a sense of what the growth in interest in robotics has been? Let’s take a snapshot: 10 years ago, what was it like? What was it like 5 years ago? What is it today? What kind of growth are we seeing? What percentage of your RFPs/RFQs are actually asking for it?

DB: That’s a great question. I would say that 10 years ago there were very few opportunities or very few discussions about robotics. We would have robotics discussions with, let’s say, large automotive companies that were doing thousands of parts a week or year, and they would, mostly, at that time talk to outside robotics companies and try to integrate robotics into a heat treat market, where a lot of robotics companies would say, “You mean this surface is going to be warped? It’s going to be changed the next time I go to put that same part in that same location?”

I can tell you that it caused a lot of havoc in the heat treat business. Also, with just handling parts in and out of the heat treat load, whether it was a new heat load that was green, or a heat treat load that was already hard — handling those parts differently, especially in a gas quench situation, knowing that they’ve been processed or not — that was also a new development in robotics.

So, 5 years ago, I would say, you started seeing more people where there were several robotic companies that were out there that were starting to say, “Hey, we can handle this.” Vision was coming along a lot faster and there was more presence of vision with the robotics.

Today, I would say in the last 18 months to 2 years, we’ve seen a real uptick in RFPs and RFQs coming in where they’re looking to a company like ECM where we have a lot of experience in automation to further that arm to get robotics involved with not only just processing a load of parts, but taking the parts single piece, building a load and then processing that, and then giving the piece part back to the operations. That’s been increasing quite a bit.

In an effort to take care of that, about 5 years ago we had purchased a company that was doing a lot of robotics internally with their furnace systems in the semiconductor industry. We had a lot of robotic technical expertise in that. If you know that industry, you’re handling a lot of thin parts and a lot of movement, very high volume, and also there is a lot of vision that’s being used in that and also vision in the quality control afterwards, as well.

So, we’re seeing requests for robots loading and unloading. We’re seeing requests for robots picking up parts, putting them in front of the camera, and actually measuring the part for distortion control. We’re also seeing parts that are being automatically hardness tested before they’re put into the finish part bins or totes, or wherever the next stage of processing is.

DG: I assume, at that point in time, they’re able to separate the sheep from the goats, so to speak. Well hardened, not well hardened, and that type of thing.

DB: Exactly. There are a lot more automated systems for process quality control, as well, as the parts come out of the furnace.

DG: Let me ask you this question: When some people think of robots, we start thinking of the Jetson’s or something like that, but I think most people with their feet on the ground and their head’s not in the clouds too much, when we think of robots, I tend to think of that robotic arm, that type of thing, right? Where it’s a stationary robot, if you will, with functions within its reach. Is this the type of robot we’re talking about now, is that what is most common, or do you anticipate that there’s going to be those, let’s say, “mobile” robots that are roaming around doing things, helping workers, or are they exoskeleton-type robots that are on the backs of people? I’m curious what your prognosticating is on that point.

DB: A very good question, again. When we look at robotics moving parts around the plant, we usually call those AGVs, or automatic guided vehicles. We’re working on a number of projects with those types of facilities and that reduces a lot of traffic, internally, for people moving forklifts arounds and it becomes a much safer facility.

DG: And these are not on tracks, right? They’re not on monorails or railroad tracks, it’s just free moving?

DB: Tracks are a thing of the past, now, with AGVs. There are a number of different ways of doing it. I’m not an AGV specialist, or a robotics specialist for that matter, but they do have AGVs now that are controlled by cameras up in the plant so that the cameras know exactly where the AGV is and is located.

There are also ways of putting tape down or some other line in the concrete where the AGV can follow. Those methods are out there for AGVs. Usually, the AGVs are used in some of the situations we’re into right now. They’re used to promote the accurate takt time through the plant. Whether they need a part every 20 minutes or every 10 minutes, it’s well designed in that fashion. There are usually tracks or pallets that are on these AGVs that move from machining center to heat treat center to post-machining heat treat center. Those things are very much out there. AGVs have, also, grown leaps and bounds, as well, in their own right.

As far as the robot being stationary or, as you spoke about, working together with other operators in a collaborative fashion, both of these methods are being used, of course. But we still see that the larger, single-arm robot, let’s say, can be multifaceted.

In other words, we can have 3 or 4 handling devices or grippers, as we would say, on the end of this robot. It could be picking up a part, then picking up a tray, then picking up a full load, with the same gripper or same handset that’s on the gripper. These are multifaceted robots. You’re not really looking at every time you need to pick up a different part you need to have a different tool. That’s what’s being done with those, as well as trying to reduce the footprint and making a much safer robot system with the collaborative design where, if you touch it, it stops. In addition, robot programming, also, has become far less tedious, let’s say, or far less required from a specific person to do the programming.

"In other words, we can have 3 or 4 handling devices or grippers, as we would say, on the end of this robot. It could be picking up a part, then picking up a tray, then picking up a full load, with the same gripper or same handset that’s on the gripper. These are multifaceted robots."

DG: And you mentioned the word I wanted to ask you about which is probably the hot topic, and we’ll have to make sure the lawyers get involved here. What about safety? It’s not just the mobile AGVs, I think you said, that are afraid of running somebody over or hitting somebody, but it’s also these stationary ones that have moving parts. Are there any safety concerns? What can you tell us about the safety and the advances in safety?

DB: Well, of course, safety is always a very, very important part. We’re trying to eliminate workers by not having to pick these parts, but we still need to be safe in that environment. There are a number of ways. A lot of people are trying to get away from the full cages with light curtains and those kinds of things. Using the collaborative robots, where they’re touch-sensitive and can be shut off instantaneously, are probably the best way to go. With the AGVs running through the plant, there are a number of sensor systems on those AGVs that would stop them, as well as they move at a very slow pace, as well, throughout the plant.

There are a number of safety devices depending on the installation. Whether it’s a stand-alone system or it’s something working collaboratively with a person, safety is always important and can be working, l would say, much more advantageous these days with other workers.

DG: In one sense, there are people who resist robotics because they may be afraid of it replacing people or hurting people and things of that sort, but in a sense, the whole advantage here is that ultimately it is better for the human worker to have these machines doing it. Typically, the robotics are taking away some of the redundant, tedious work. Would you agree with that?

DB: I agree and that’s typically what we discuss with the customers. It’s where in your plan do you have difficulty hiring people to work? I would say 90% of those customers answer: I can’t hire anybody for a long period of time when they’re taking the part from a bin and putting it in a fixture or taking a part out of the fixture and replacing it in the bin properly. They say that those people last a few months, and they move on. The worst case is if you have someone that’s been there a long time and you put them in that position, it’s a negative for them. They finally feel like, “okay, they’ve got something on me and I have to go down and build loads.”

Like you said, people are thinking about robots and they’re a little bit hesitant, but I would say that, and maybe you’ll get to this question but, it’s more the possibilities and the way people think about robots. I would have to say the most that I’ve heard, especially from heat treaters, is, “Well, it’s not going to do what I need it to do.” “I can’t use a robot because I don’t have that many of the same part every year.” Really, that is changing. What we’re planning on doing is having a demo site here, hopefully before the end of this year, where we could have certain bins of parts and show how, with vision, we can pick up different parts and put them in heat treat loads and move them around.

DG: Let’s go there because that actually was a question I wanted to ask: To a certain extent, we’re limited in our willingness to use robotics because we’re probably limited in our understanding of what they can do. I’m quite sure, as much as ECM has dedicated resources to developing current capabilities, there are some dreamers in your group that say, “You know, we could get robots to this if only someone would say ‘okay’.” Can you share with us maybe some of the things that you are currently doing that are a little "cutting edge" or at least useful to our captive heat treaters? And also, some of those things that could be done? I’m curious as to the extent of where we might be able to go in the next 10 years.

DB: I am, even myself, learning as we go along, as well, of the technologies that are out there. What I’m impressed with robotics is they not only help once they’re installed, but before the concept is even put together. I’ve put on VR glasses and walked through a heat treat and you can understand exactly what the robot’s function is, what it sees, where it goes. We can actually also walk through a furnace installation and see what the height of everything is, what the level of everything is, how it moves around. Those are some of the applications even before you get the robot installed.

The other possibilities that people do think that “Oh, this is going to be expensive, first of all." They think it’s not going to work on my parts in my situation. There will be some concessions that everybody is going to need to make. For instance, the heat treat fixtures, maybe the ones that are really warped, you’re going to have to not use those as much anymore. Or, you may have to a more standard basket or a more standard fixture for all the parts. You may not get your million parts in one load (like everybody wants to get), but you would get them done more efficiently and faster.

Some of the applications we’ve done where we’ve taken very thin ceramic material and put it on setters and put them in some brazing furnaces and sintering furnaces, and then move the loads around, unstack the load, stack the load, restack the load, and done that all completely in a robotic cell, without touching the parts, ever. And then, as the parts come out, they’re electrically tested to make sure they’re good.

Like I said, in this other application or several other applications, we’ve also done bulk filling of CFC fixtures. You would have a CFC fixture that needed to be bulk loaded with small pieces, we actually have them go through a vibrating machine, fill the CFC fixture to a certain level, the robot comes over and puts a screen on top, moves the CFC fixture onto a heat treat load and does that continuously.

DG: Is that done by weight or by vision?

DB: Both. Because you can have the weight, but you may not have it even.

DG: Right, the distribution -- it would vibrate it out until it’s acceptable and then the screen would come in.

DB: Exactly. And, like I said, the possibilities of heat treat robotics is what it’s coming down to. Heat treat robotics, today, is to educate and have everybody understand that it is and could be capable of taking flat parts out of bins and putting them in fixtures properly and removing them and doing the reverse action. We need to educate people that these things are available out there. And it doesn’t have to be any particular type of furnace or any particular type of size of load of the furnace, it is a matter of setting up a station, maybe a loading/unloading station that you might have an area in your plant, to do the robotic handling of it, with our expertise in heat treating, understanding the facets of what happens to the parts and the fixtures during the heat treat process.

Those are the kinds of things that we see. Like I said, right from the design of the system and the layout, understanding how everything is going to work on a VR standpoint, all the way to implementation in a facility that takes in many different parts on a daily basis and processes them. I think that’s true to form in what’s moving forward in robotics today.

DG: I want to throw this one at you and see what your input is on this: Let’s think about robotics for the whole way through a process. I want to think, just for a minute, about a mesh belt furnace, let’s say. I know you guys do a lot in vacuum and things of that sort, but it could be the same type of thing.

Could we use, on the frontend, robotics to do, not only placement of the product, but product inspection, let’s say, making sure it’s a clean surface (with nitriding, for example), making sure impurities are off and things of that sort? I assume we could us robotics on that end to inspect the product, making sure it’s good to go in the basket, then we put it in the basket or in the fixture, goes through the furnace, comes out the other end, is picked up and inspected at that time for whether it be hardness or distortion or whatever, and then placed on where it needs to go. I assume all that’s possible, correct?

DB: You assume and yes, it is possible. I, personally, haven’t seen anybody install that particular system, but I would love to be part of it. We have designed a system and quoted on a system that was using a mesh belt where the customer of the heat treat department felt that the parts (these were coin-shaped type parts) and it felt better that the parts were processed better vertically rather than just in a pile on the belt.

So, these parts were put in small fixtures on the belt (and this fixture was maybe 6" x 6" and took up a 4'-wide belt) and those were loaded in place very properly and then also on the outside on the outlet of the furnace belt were also unloaded. Then, of course, the design was for them to inspect them by coloration and then also by hardness. And I didn’t share that with you before this meeting, but that was one application that we quoted on and it’s something that is very doable.

DG: A couple final questions for you: We talked earlier about the companies who, for example, if they high diversity of product and not high quantity of those products, I assume, and you’ve mentioned it, that robotics probably is not as likely to be helpful to them as to a company who has low variability of products but high volume of those products. Do you have any comments on that? For example, a commercial heat treater who does all kinds of crazy things and doesn’t have a lot of any one thing, is it safe to say robotics probably would not be as useful to them?

DB: I would have to say that that is the thought that we’re trying to change. We’re trying to change that thought because I’ve sat at a number of tables during the lunches and dinners at some of these presentations and that’s exactly what I hear from the heat treaters: “Robotics isn’t for me; I don’t do enough of the same part.” In reality, a lot of these robotics systems now are easily programmable by grabbing the gripper and moving it to where you want it to go. And if you have repeatable parts (maybe you don’t have a hundred million of these parts in the same month, but maybe you have ten thousand of them over 12 months) once that’s programmed in the robot, then you have that program for the next time. There may be some initial programming time that you have to apply to it. We don’t see that that is a big downside because the vision system will understand what the part looks like before the robot picks it up. The programming has become much easier and simpler for everybody so that you don’t have to have a big staff just to take care of the robots.

I think that’s the other misnomer that companies have is that if I get a robot, I not only have to pay for the robot, but I must have the five support-staff for that robot, when, in fact, that is not something that’s becoming a thing. In one of the cases, the same person that was talking about the quality of the robot was also talking about the excitement of his team to work with the robot and to be able to learn to program that robot, and that being their job rather than loading and unloading the fixtures. To them, that was more exciting and made them come to work, wanting to come to work every day, and was also a lead-in for them to hire more people, to say, “Hey, we’re implementing robotics in the plant and as an opportunity to work in that department eventually or eventually we’ll bring robotics into your department.” There are those incentives, as well, with some of the employees.

DG: You may have hinted at this before: You’re saying that programming of the robots, sometimes, can be as easy as showing it what to do by moving it, saying, “Here’s what you do: Grab this, put this here, grab this, put this here." That’s as easy as it can be?

DB: It’s becoming that way, yes. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve seen a lot of demos, as a lot of other people have, but yes, those things are possible. Get it in a general location and then you tweak it a little bit here and there- yes, those things are much easier to do.

DG: Probably, to say to those who are "robotic doubters," let’s say, it would be good to not assume it’s as difficult as what you might think and to keep an open mind.

Let me ask you this: You could be a commercial heat treater, but most of our audience or a lot of our audience are the manufacturers with their own in-house heat treat or what we call captive heat treaters. What questions should they be asking themselves about robotics, whether or not it makes sense for them? Is there a list of questions they ought to be asking or considering before they even consider robotics?

DB: I think that when you’re doing repetitive operations in your facilities, whether it’s captive or heat treat shop, that’s where you get the most benefit from a robotic system, obviously. That’s one thing. The other one is: Are you doing similar operations in that repetitiveness? Are you always building the same type of fixture? Are you always building it for the same furnace load? Those things.

"The more similarities you can get that robot to work with, the more cost effective it becomes. But there are also a lot of benefits to having that robot be very versatile in working with a number of different size furnace loads as well as part dimensions."

The more similarities you can get that robot to work with, the more cost effective it becomes. But there are also a lot of benefits to having that robot be very versatile in working with a number of different size furnace loads as well as part dimensions. I can’t say that there’s a specific set of questions, but certainly would love to work with any customer that has even a thought that maybe they should look into this.

DG: I think the high repeatability is critical. I would imagine, Dennis, that if they’re dealing with high-value parts, even if there’s not a huge number of them, and they’re looking to eliminate the potential for human error, even if it’s simply in the placement of that product or if they’re looking for single-part traceability, perhaps, robotic systems, definitely, it seems to me, would be also something that would be of interest.

DB: Absolutely. In-process defects is something that it would be very good at eliminating. Also, as you said, if you were looking for traceability, I can tell you that we can build a robot system that can trace, even if you have 500 parts in a heat treat load, it can tell you exactly where that part came from in the load, where you put it in the load, where it came from and where it went after it came off of the heat treat rack.

Traceability is a good point that I didn’t bring up, thank you for that, Doug. Traceability is really important, as well- we can do that with the furnaces. And that’s for a single-piece part flow whereas a lot of people are going to that method. A single piece gets to the heat treat furnace, not a bin of parts. Then, you can trace every part through the heat treat load and back out of it.

DG: The other thought I was having while you were talking was, and this may be only in a number of very minor cases, but a lot of times there are situations where a part has got to come out of a hot furnace, it’s got to cool off in order to be moved to the next process — it seems to me with any type of automation, robotics included, you could eliminate the amount of heat loss between furnace one and temper furnace or the next process.

DB: I think another application is operating press quenches where you’re moving a hot part over the end of a furnace and moving it over to a quench, it’s an extremely hot part that you don’t want to touch. Obviously, there are gantry systems for that and there are a number of robot systems that can be installed to get those people out of those hazardous jobs. Also, in terms of quality because timing is very important, as well.

DG: You mentioned about maintenance of these systems a little bit, or at least the programming of them. I’m assuming maintenance is somewhat of an issue. If there are moving parts and things of that sort, there is probably going to be some maintenance on it, whether it be hardware maintenance and/or software maintenance. Any comments on the amount of money or time that a person would spend maintaining these systems as opposed to maintaining a human being doing those systems?

DB: That’s a very good question, again, and it should be something that’s part of your machine maintenance. It is a machine tool; it is going to need some maintenance, so it’s part of your maintenance requirements. If people use this same maintenance priority that they do for the heat treat furnaces, thank goodness robots work really well, as well, in hazardous environments. I would say that they hold up very well. Robots have been around a number of years and they’re very industrialized. Maintenance is not as critical as it used to be, but it is, obviously, still required.

DG: And I’m sure they can handle the environments, too. Hopefully, the environments in the heat treat shops are getting better and not so smokey and oily and that type of thing. I’m assuming that any robots you put in would be able to handle whatever environment it’s in.

DB: That would be part of the requirements, as well.

DG: Any concluding thoughts? Anything I’ve missed that you want to hit on, Dennis?

DB: When you think, “Robotics isn’t for me,” spend a little time and look into it. I’ve been blown away with the technology of today. Look at our cellphones — they aren’t even phones anymore. We use them for many, many more things than just a phone. Robotics have come to be that way, as well. There are so many more things that can be used in conjunction with the robotics to help you get your job done and service your customer appropriately and with good quality parts.

DG: I’ve got one other question I just thought of: I perceive that a lot of times companies in Europe are a bit ahead of us on technology or at least the adoption of some of these technologies. With ECM, the mothership of which being in France, are you seeing that there is a wider acceptance of robotics from companies in Europe than here in the States?

DB: I wouldn’t call it acceptance, but there are many more applications and customers looking into it in Europe than there are here, yes. I think that, maybe, we haven’t realized that the people aren’t there we’re not going to find them. Then, I think in Europe, where they realized, even just a few years ago, that they’re just not going to find these people and they need to automate. Or the operators that they can find are not going to get the job done the way they need it to get it done because technology has grown so fast with the quality of the parts necessary, especially with EV products today, dropping a part or having a part nicked by something, or even continuous productivity is important.

So, yes, we’ve seen more in Europe, and that’s another reason we’ve been on the leading edge of this technology and now bringing it to the U.S. in North America in a more simpler fashion with the same people having this inexperience as over in Europe.

DG: Being somewhat facetious, the other things robots give you that humans don’t is they don’t have to pass drug tests. I’m pretty sure that the robots are okay.

DB: They don’t have to pass drug tests and they don’t have to get COVID tests either!

DG: And they don’t miss many days of work!

For more information, contact:

ECM-USA.com

DB@ECM-USA.com (Dennis' email)

336-210-5316 (Dennis' cell)

Doug Glenn Publisher Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn
Publisher
Heat Treat Today

To find other Heat Treat Radio episodes, go to www.heattreattoday.com/radio .

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