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Heat Treat Radio #121: Equipment And Process Insights From A Rising Metallurgical Engineer

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In this Heat Treat Radio episode, join host Doug Glenn as he talks with Katelyn Kirsch, a metallurgical engineer with extensive experience in the heat treating industry. Katelyn discusses her career journey, including roles at Huron Casting, Federal Screw Works, and Moeller Aerospace. She highlights her responsibilities in integrating new equipment and processes, managing thermal processing, and setting up a metallurgical lab. Katelyn also shares insights on the challenges of implementing new processes, the importance of hands-on experience, and the benefits of bringing processes in-house for improved turnaround times. The episode provides valuable perspectives for professionals in the heat treating field. 

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

Introduction (00:00:54)

Doug Glenn: So let me introduce you to Katelyn Kirsch. I’m not going to do too much in the way of an introduction, except to mention the three companies that I’m aware of that you’ve worked at and then I want to ask you a few questions about your background, as well.  

From what I understand, you have a degree in metallurgical engineering from South Dakota School of Mines and Technologies and a master’s degree from Strayer in project management.  

Huron Casting is one of the companies you worked for, then Federal Screw, and then most recently Moeller Aerospace. First off, I want to welcome you, and now can you tell the listeners and viewers a little bit more about what you did at each of these companies? 

Katelyn Kirsch: At Huron Casting, my first job out of college, I was a metallurgist. While I was there, I focused on overall quality of our product, from the point of alloying into a furnace to where we cast it through our heat treat processes, ensuring the chemistry is good because  hardnesses are everything.  

For Federal Screw, I was the metallurgical lab supervisor. I ran our metallurgical lab, managed our thermal processing on our neutral hardening quench temper furnace, our subcritical anneal, and all of our induction processes in-house, and then managed the quality from all of our sub-tier heat treaters that we had to use while I was there.  

At Moeller, I’m currently in the quality engineer role, but I’m helping them bring in their metallurgical lab and also bringing in heat treat and potentially brazing. 

Doug Glenn: I do want to mention to the listeners and viewers of this podcast that Katelyn is one of the 40 recipients of our Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 award for 2024. Congratulations on that. One of the rising young leaders in the industry, which is very good. 

Federal Screw (03:26) 

I would like to ask you a little bit more about your time at Federal Screw, because I understand when you were there, you were involved. I want our listeners to kind of get inside of your head on how it works inside a manufacturing plant that’s doing thermal processing. How do people think about integrating new processes and new products? You were responsible for introducing a new part line at Federal Screw. 

Katelyn Kirsch: While I was there, we already had our neutral hardening and temper line, and we had one induction hardening process. When I started, we were getting ready to bring in another induction hardening process on half shaft axle bars. So, we got the equipment probably about a year and a half after I started, and I was responsible for getting the line running and conforming parts off our heat treat line.  

I’ve done induction before, so I figured this isn’t going to be too difficult — I was sorely mistaken. It was a much bigger project than any of us anticipated. We were bringing parts in from the incumbent, which was our customer as well. They had been doing the parts for 40 years, so they knew exactly how to do this. They’d been doing it, and we were coming in and right off the bat trying to get going.  

With Covid and everything at the time, it really shrunk our developing process. We were on an expedited timeline trying to get it going. So, we just had to throw it at the machine. We were going to try “x, y, and z” and just see where it ended up and start tweaking from there. We were trying to get to know the equipment while we were developing. It was a long, grueling process — many long nights. 

Doug Glenn: I can imagine. Were you involved in the selection of the induction equipment or was that already done when you got there? 

Katelyn Kirsch: They had selected the equipment before I started, but beyond that, I was involved with the selection of lab equipment, completing the runoffs, and working with the equipment manufacturer to make sure we had everything we needed. 

Doug Glenn: That whole process was painful primarily because of how quickly you had to have it up and running, correct? You didn’t have time to really thoroughly vet it.  

Katelyn Kirsch: Yes, it was a very expedited process. After we had the equipment set up, we kept hitting one hurdle after another, where we thought, “Okay, this isn’t working, I have to pass this hurdle.” We would come up to a speed bump, fix it, and keep moving forward. 

Doug Glenn: How many people were involved on the team at Federal Screw in the integration of this new induction process? 

Katelyn Kirsch: On the actual heat treat process itself, it was primarily me, and then our engineering manager or manufacturing manager set up the rest of the line. We were trying to set up the machining process because we were trying to do everything at once, like a robotic line. They load parts in the machine, and it just continues through until the parts leave the temper furnace. 

Doug Glenn: So you were trying to automate the whole thing? 

Heat Treat Radio #121 Katelyn Kirsch (left) Doug Glenn (right)

Katelyn Kirsch:  Yes, we were trying to handle the manufacturing side, and we had a program manager who was trying to help on the heat treat side to at least arrange people. We had people to help with testing and on the mechanical side if I needed help trying to work on a machine. We had a couple programmers in charge of the automation of the robots, but it was primarily myself on the specific heat treat side, and then my lab techs trying to run product, test product, run more samples, and test more samples. 

Doug Glenn: Other than the internal team, did you find yourself utilizing any resources external to Federal Screw, besides the company that you were doing the work for? 

Katelyn Kirsch: Besides the company we were doing the work for, we didn’t really need to outsource until we tried eliminating heat treating a certain area of the part. We were getting quench crack failures on these parts — it was almost just inherent to the process of how the part had to be heat treated — and there were certain methods you could use to mitigate that. You could try to eliminate for a while, but it was something that was inevitably going to happen. It was a very thin section, and when we would heat that up to harden and quench it — I’m pretty sure you know what’s going to happen. 

Doug Glenn: As we say, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Which part was it?  

Katelyn Kirsch: Half shaft axle bars. 

Doug Glenn: Before we move away from discussing Federal Screw, as you look back on that experience, were there any major lessons that you brought with you to Moeller — anything that you learned about the metallurgical industry, your specific job, or metallurgical labs? 

Katelyn Kirsch: Going through school, you’re going to learn all of your technical knowledge, all the theories that you’re going to apply throughout heat treating. But working especially at Federal Screw, you learned the most from the operators. Becoming a good friend with my operators at Federal Screw, I learned more about the heat treat process, like what I would need to tweak in a furnace. I know what a book is going to tell me to do, but a book and practice are not always the same thing. 

Doug Glenn: Are you talking about the induction equipment operators? 

Katelyn Kirsch: Yes, induction equipment operators, like a hardening furnace operator, temper furnace operator. On the induction machine, I was so integrated in that process, I could get my data from a test bar. I would know if I needed to up my amperage or take it down. I was so involved in that process that I knew more than our operators because it was just a robot running it, essentially. If I was gone, I was just a call in to the manager of the line to say, “Go up, take out 5%, test it. It should be right where you want it to be.” 

Doug Glenn: Were you able to monitor equipment remotely? 

Katelyn Kirsch: For the equipment they purchased for that line, I was able to log in remotely through TeamViewer into the computer system and help them recover from a failure. If I was off-site or at home, if the machine crashed or if they were getting errors, I was able to log in and see what was going on with the machine. I could give them direction and tell them what to do. Most of the time it was a phone call to tell them, “Hey, watch the robot, make sure I don’t crash into anything and break it.” Then I’d start moving everything from home. 

Doug Glenn: Was it actually a robot or was it more just like a scanning station?  

Katelyn Kirsch: It was a gantry system. The parts would leave a cleaning line and would basically just roll over to the machine. A gantry would pick them up, bring them, put them in the machine. The machine itself is a scanning induction machine. So, it would do the hardening, then the gantry would take those parts out, and put new ones in.  

Doug Glenn: I assumed you had a scanner, an induction scanner of some sort, since you were talking about half shafts. So, it was basically a gantry system to load and unload,  and then when it unloaded, it went straight from there to a temper furnace. 

Katelyn Kirsch: It went back to another conveyor, and the conveyor rolled straight over to another robot that would pick them up on another conveyor that would take them over to the temper furnace. 

Doug Glenn: Did the robots load a basket full for the temper furnace? 

Katelyn Kirsch: It was a continuous temper,  so it had slots that the bars would rest in. 

Moeller Aerospace (13:08) 

Doug Glenn: Let’s move over to Moeller. Tell us about what you have been tasked with at Moeller? 

Katelyn Kirsch: At Moeller, I’m a vane nozzle QE. But one of the main reasons Moeller hired me was to help bring in the metallurgical lab first. 

Our quality director came from another company and they had everything in-house between their metallurgical lab, coding, heat treat, brazing, etc. So they didn’t have to outsource much coming in. So we were able to start building our plan for our metallurgical lab. We’re a couple months away from doing our first audit — I’m excited. 

Doug Glenn: What are you being audited for?  

Katelyn Kirsch: With aerospace, you have customer-specific audits and then you have Nadcap audits. With our primary customer, who’s probably about 80% of our business, we are going to be doing their audit first so we can start auditing their product in-house, and then we’d be needing approval after that. 

Doug Glenn: So you’re involved now with the Nadcap audit. Will the Nadcap be for heat treat or Nadcap or for a metallurgical lab for testing. 

Katelyn Kirsch: It’ll be the metallurgical lab first. 

Doug Glenn: Have you already purchased most of the equipment for the metallurgical lab? 

Katelyn Kirsch:  Yes, that was my first task. We’re focusing mainly on metal graphic mounts first — we’re not going to be getting into hardness testing yet. But we purchased all that we needed and that was delivered probably about midway of last year. We finished hooking it up and water plumbing, and completed all our venting in November of this past year. So we’ve been able to get in and actually start working with the equipment, getting prepped for the audit, making sure everything’s aligned, and that we are not missing any piece of equipment. 

Doug Glenn: Do you do your own heat treating there for this part. 

Katelyn Kirsch: We will be —we don’t have in-house heat treat yet. 

Process of Purchasing Lab Equipment (17:04)  

Doug Glenn: Tell me a little bit about the process for purchasing the lab equipment. How many people were involved?  

Rehearse with us on what it takes and the difficulty of the process. 

Katelyn Kirsch: It was actually pretty easy on my part. Coming from the automotive sector where with a very high-volume lab, I knew the nuances of equipment purchasing and of training people in a lab. In my opinion, one of the hardest things to train is teaching how to grind and polish a mount. It’s hard to do, it’s very finesse. Even people who have been doing it for 20-30 years can mess it up if they’re doing it by hand.  

Purchasing Equipment

Essentially, I was given a budget after I initially picked out equipment and I was told keep it under $X amount. I picked the equipment, sent the list off to my boss. He went to the CEO and had to sign off for the capital purchase, and then we got everything ordered. 

Doug Glenn: Did you go primarily with equipment you were comfortable with from the past or did you shop around much? 

Katelyn Kirsch: A little bit of both — there were two manufacturers that I’ve worked with in the past that I liked, and I decided to go with a manufacturer that was more stateside so I could get real time help, if I needed it. Also, their price range enabled me to get more of the equipment that I would need and try to keep it under budget. 

Doug Glenn: Being somewhat stateside was important here for service and replacement parts or whatever you needed. How large is Moeller, employee-wise?  

Katelyn Kirsch: I think we’re about 270-300 employees. 

Doug Glenn: So you have purchased testing equipment, you have it in place, and you’re at the point now where you can start getting the certification that your customer requires. You’ll get that down and then move onto a general Nadcap certification. 

Have you done one of these audits before?  

Katelyn Kirsch: Not specifically this audit. In the automotive industry, I had to do the CQI-9 self-assessment, and I was always involved with the audits when we had our INTF audit at Federal Screw. I had to walk them through the heat treat process and the lab side of that audit.  

Doug Glenn: Is this the first lab audit you’ve completed?  

Katelyn Kirsch: Yes, this is the first lab-specific audit. I’ve reviewed their specifications, so I think it shouldn’t be too bad. 

Doug Glenn: Are you in the midst of it now? Where are you in the process? 

Katelyn Kirsch: We’re prepping for the audit currently. We’re aiming for a march audit date. So we’re in the final stages of documentation. 

Doug Glenn: That’s coming right up. Is there anything else you’d like to say regarding the audit process or equipment selection process that you think would be helpful to other people that may be in your shoes? Any lessons learned? 

Katelyn Kirsch: If it’s something that you’re not familiar with, if you have a colleague that has equipment that you can get your hands on, or if you’re in the position that we’re in where we are trying to bring processes in-house, and you have a good relationship with your customer who might have a lab, see if you can get in and work with and see that equipment. I know there are many companies that have satellite labs that you can see the equipment firsthand.  

That’s what drove much of my purchasing on the lab equipment itself was knowing and being familiar with what works well, what we would need to make it an easy training process, and make it as smooth as possible. 

Doug Glenn: The drive to bring these processes in-house was basically control and timeliness. Were you not able to find labs in the area that you were comfortable with? 

Katelyn Kirsch: No, it’s primarily the turnaround time. In aerospace, when we go to work on what we call an MPI, which is essentially a product launch, we lose competitiveness. We do electrical discharge machining (EDM) in-house. When we have to send those out for a lab cut up —the lab that we use could take 2–5 weeks. You get stuck waiting and hoping it comes out good, and then possibly find out it failed and we have to go back and change it. 

It’s the same reason we’re bringing heat treating in-house and then brazing, to have a quicker turnaround time, and it’s easier to diagnose. We could run a sample; if it fails, we can go back and run it again. 

Advice for the Next Gen of Metallurgy Professionals (23:15) 

Doug Glenn: You’re one of the younger professionals in the industry. Is there anything you would say to younger people still high school or college age that are thinking about getting into either metallurgy, metals, metals industry, thermal processing etc. — any advice? 

Katelyn Kirsch:  If it’s something that you’re passionate about, go for it. The schooling might be scary, but it’s very rewarding. I felt good about school all the time. It was something that you could put your hands to and see what you did.  

When you get into the industry itself, become best friends with your operators. I’m a big proponent of knowing you can learn anything from A to Y in your textbook, but that last letter, Z, you’re going to get from your operators who have been running the processes. They know more about what they can do, what’s happening in their equipment, and what’s happening in their furnaces that your book is not going to tell you. It’s going to be that practice that’s going to help put the final polish on your process and getting performing parts. 

Doug Glenn: Speaking of polishing, what drew you into metallurgy? 

Katelyn Kirsch: I started off my schooling as a mechanical engineering major. I was in my third year of schooling and I was bored. I didn’t have joy in my homework. I didn’t really see myself being a mechanical engineer. I didn’t see myself being able to have a career. As a mechanical engineering major at South Dakota School of Mines, we have to take a metallurgy class. Once I took that class, I thought it was really interesting. You have your basically forensic science and then going to failure analysis, and I thought it was interesting. So, I talked to the head of my department, and I switched majors. Honestly I was overjoyed — it was the best decision I’ve ever made. 

Doug Glenn: What did you enjoy about it?  

Pursuing Education

Katelyn Kirsch: I learned really well based on theory and how to derive from where you came from, and metallurgy is a lot of deriving to find your problem. There’s no one key solution in metallurgy to fix a problem. I love learning that way. I love that kind of process. 

Doug Glenn: Putting all the parts together, and figuring it all out. It’s pretty interesting. I often find when we do a series of episodes called NextGen, which you would fit in nicely, we talk more about your personal experience, and I’m always fascinated that when we ask people, “Did you ever think there was so much to metallurgy?” It’s just fascinating when you get right into it. There’s a lot to be learned, and there’s a lot of mystery out there still about how things work. 

Katelyn Kirsch: They had three different branches for the major. You had your physical metallurgy, you had your extractive metallurgy, and then your pyro metallurgy, essentially your heat treat processing. I did very well in the extractive classes, but I disliked it. I got great grades in those classes, but I did not like them. It was more of the physical and the processing side of metallurgy that I was keen on. 

Doug Glenn: That’s very good. Katelyn, thank you very much. Thanks for spending some time with us. I know you probably have to get back to Moeller and start actually doing some real work getting ready for your Nadcap audit.  

About the Guest

Katelyn Kirsch
Quality Engineer
Moeller Aerospace

Katelyn Kirsch has a Bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering from South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and a Master’s degree in Project Management from Strayer University. Her time in the industry began at Huron Casting Corporate Services as a metallurgical engineer. Through her work experiences, Katelyn has gained technical knowledge across many disciplines: various processes for making steel in a continuous casting mill and shell casting foundry; heat treating for components from different industries, and multi-industry metallurgical inspections. She has developed strong skills in the lab including handling testing production samples, failure analysis and material characterization, and Production Part Approval Processes (PPAP), such as PFMEA development. 

Moving from her leadership position at Federal Screw Works to join Moeller Aerospace, Katelyn is on track to assume the leadership of a new metallurgical lab in development, followed by the planning of all equipment being installed, in order to begin validation and certification of the testing process. Her current role at Moeller Aerospace is quality engineer, however, her projects will include the establishing of heat treating and other operations in the coming years. Kaitlyn Kirsch was a Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 class of 2024.

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Heat Treat Radio #120: Exploring Sustainable Practices in Heat Treating

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In this Heat Treat Radio episode, Tracy Dougherty, President & CEO of AFC Holcroft, and Ed Wykes, Director of Field Service and Aftermarket Sales, join host Doug Glenn as he discusses sustainability in the heat treat industry. They explore the importance of sustainable practices in the design and operation of thermal processing equipment. Whether you’re upgrading current equipment or innovating new, these changes can improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact. This episode underscores the industry’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. 

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

Introduction (01:12) 

Doug Glenn:  Sustainability continues to be a driving force in the design and operation of thermal process equipment, as well as ancillary services that are provided by equipment manufacturers. There are few companies in the North American marketplace who are more qualified to talk about equipment and especially sustainability than AFC-Holcroft. We have two experts from the industry with us today.  

Tracy Dougherty is a 1984 graduate with a degree in tool and die design. He spent his first 15 years in the metal fabricating and stamping industry in various positions, including tool and die designer, application engineer, and manufacturing engineer, before transitioning into a sales role.  

Tracy also spent time in material handling, robotics and automation, and the capital equipment industry before starting with AFC-Holcroft in 2008. While at AFC-Holcroft, Tracy’s done various positions, including sales engineer, sales manager, vice president of sales, and currently president and CEO. Congratulations on that.  

Ed Wykes is our second guest. Ed is currently the director of field service and aftermarket sales at AFC-Holcroft. He has a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering and business administration, with a minor in business and administration from Kettering University in 1998. Also, he earned an associate’s degree in mechanical engineering/mechanical technology from Wentworth Institute of Technology in 1996. 

 Ed began his career as a manufacturing engineer at General Motors in 1998 and has been with AFC-Holcroft for a while. He started as a mechanical engineering manager, and now is the director of field service and sales.  

Let’s talk about sustainability. I want to break our conversation down into two sections. The first section is going to be on sustainability services, which we don’t often think about. We think about equipment being manufactured in a sustainable way, but there are really a lot of services out there that people can use to help improve efficiency and sustainability. Then we’ll talk about some things happening on the equipment front. 

“Green” Services — Sustainability Services (04:40) 

Doug Glenn: “Green services.” What is AFC-Holcroft currently seeing in the industry about people requesting services, as far as sustainable services? 

Edward Wykes: Our equipment is technical in nature, and it should have longevity in the field — decades. To make that happen, there has to be some service and some sustainability that goes along with that. So, it is technical in nature, and we understand our clients’ needs. Whether it’s a shift or just the development of the market, we understand the client is putting more and more emphasis on sustainability and preventative maintenance.  

This comes in many different shapes and forms. As a sidebar, that’s one of the really enjoyable things about working here at AFC-Holcroft — you never know what your next challenge is going to be Every day is a new adventure. But specifically, some of the critical services, as far as sustainability for our equipment in the field, would be National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) inspections that specifically speak to combustion safeties, temperature uniformity surveys (TUS) on equipment, system accuracy tests (SAT), looking at infrared signatures on electrical devices and components. Also, burner tuning is another service that should be regularly considered by our clients.  

Combustion Safety

There are other services that may be a little bit more abstract, but there’s also a lot of value in these services. Engineering optimization is when technical experts from our company go into a client’s facility, whether it’s our piece of equipment or not, and say, “This piece of equipment is 30, 40, 50 years old, and here are some things that we can do that can make this piece of equipment sustainable into the future, but also more green.”  

Reducing utility is an important aspect. Many old furnaces might have had water-cooled components, such as water-cooled bearings, or water-cooled fans. There’s always an interest to eliminate the water-cooled utility.  

There are other areas. For example, an old AFC mesh belt may not have a large discharge door for maintenance at the discharge side of the furnace — our new ones do. Older pieces of equipment can be adapted with that feature, which can be the difference between being down for a week to being down for a day. 

Doug Glenn: Is the large door you mention at the exit side of the furnace for changing the belt?  

Edward Wykes: It’s for a number of things: chute maintenance, clearing out parts, when we get into any sort of belt work. There’s just a number of issues that can occur there, and having a large door at the exit side for maintenance access makes it easier — more efficient, quicker, less downtime.  

That’s the umbrella that these services and updates fall under: less downtime, increased productivity, and reduced cost. All of these updates contribute to sustainability, as well as trying to be more green, trying to be more efficient. Some of these updates are low-hanging fruit. With a little bit of technical assistance, we can bring this to fruition for our clients. 

Gas to Electric Conversions (08:38) 

Doug Glenn: You’ve been around for years, just as AFC and then AFC-Holcroft. I’m sure you have hundreds if not thousands of pieces of equipment out there. I don’t necessarily associate AFC-Holcroft with 100% gas-fired equipment because I’m pretty sure you do electric as well. Are you seeing increased requests for gas-to-electric conversions? 

Tracy Dougherty: We are. We’re still seeing those options on most of our quotes for equipment these days. North America is still a little bit slower to pull the trigger on this conversion because of the cost associated with it. There’s not really a return on investment (ROI) when you look at electric rates in most of North America, certainly in the United States, relative to gas prices — there’s still a big delta there.  

But companies are looking at it differently nowadays. It’s not the same requirement for an ROI within a few years that it used to be because it’s being driven by other things. Companies desire to truly reduce their carbon footprint, which is sometimes a corporate directive, and other times it’s driven by their client base. We’re seeing more and more of it.  

Whether it’s on the services side or on the equipment side, this is an area where we have an advantage in being a part of a larger group. By being a part of the AICHELIN Group, we have sister divisions in different parts of the world, including Asia and Europe. We have collaboration meetings with members of the AICHELIN Group. Because Europe is kind of ahead in many ways of where the United States has been, we have the advantage of seeing what they’ve done and what they’ve had success with. Therefore, whether it’s on the services side or the equipment side, it’s really a nice position for us at AFC-Holcroft to be in. 

Doug Glenn: You kind of have a leg up. That is AICHELIN Group out of Austria, correct? 

Tracy Dougherty: That’s correct. 

Doug Glenn: You’re seeing some increased interest in gas-to-electric conversions. We’re going to talk about new equipment in a minute, but let me just ask you, have you seen an increase in the request for electric-only equipment? 

Tracy Dougherty: Yes, we have. Most of our quotes these days, they’re asking for that option. We have a couple of furnaces out there now that are in the commissioning stages that are electrically heated, where in the past they would have always been gas heated. 

Doug Glenn: Are those North America-based installations? 

Tracy Dougherty: Yes. 

Impact of Push for Reducing Carbon Footprint (12:13) 

Doug Glenn: This is an opinion question, so feel free to tread lightly however you want.  Do you think the Trump effect will have any change with the refocus back to ‘drill baby drill?’ 

Tracy Dougherty: I think it’s certainly going to have an impact in a variety of ways. If we look at the electrically heated, carbon footprint push, I think there were some pretty lofty goals established by certain corporate corporations. Their own CEOs said, “Hey, we’re going to be carbon neutral by 2030,” for example, which is pretty tough if you look at what they’re doing around the globe and what a realistic target is. I think you’ll see the reins pulled back on some of those goals when it comes to carbon neutrality, for example.  

I do still think it’s gained enough focused momentum. There are still going to be companies and corporations that are going to drive it forward, which is a good thing, right? It forces us as an industry to constantly improve on what we’re offering today versus just sitting back and thinking, “Hey, everybody’s fine with gas-fired equipment.” It really forces us all within the industry to continue to push ourselves to explore what the next best thing is for efficiency and sustainability. 

Doug Glenn: I think the rate at which governments were wanting to convert gas to electric was pretty aggressive. Reactive reality is a harsh teacher. You need to do things at a pace people are willing and able to do it and that is economically viable.  

Hydrogen Combustion (14:32) 

Doug Glenn:  Is AFC-Holcroft doing anything on the service side with hydrogen combustion or are you prepping for it? Have you had people asking about it? 

Edward Wykes: The short answer is no, we have not had any hydrogen conversations with any of our clients. 

Doug Glenn: That is not unusual. I had interviewed 2 or 3 experts recently for a speech I had to put together about hydrogen. These were burner experts, and both said, “Yeah, we’re still getting information, but it has cooled off significantly.” Again, I think this is another situation where the economic reality is kind of driving the real pace, as opposed to non-market factors. 

Tracy Dougherty: That’s another advantage of being a part of the AICHLEN Group. Other group companies have experimented and looked at some of these technologies, among others. We have regular monthly meetings to go through what each of the group companies is doing from an R&D perspective. We can continue to be close enough to it to understand what some of the challenges are. 

Doug Glenn: Is that NOXMAT? That’s your burner company, but they’re also out of Europe. 

Tracy Dougherty: They are out of Europe, that’s correct. 

Doug Glenn: Like you said, you’re able to learn from these explorations and have an advantage because you can see it from a variety of perspectives, which is good.  

I want to wrap up the sustainability services portion of this. Is there anything else that AFC-Holcroft is doing right now that is worth noting on sustainability? 

Edward Wykes: To recap some of the things we just touched on here, we do have a good partnership. We are globally supported. It’s a technical company, and whether it’s engineering or field service or even our fab, we’re constantly looking for ways to bring our equipment into the next generation — whether it’s updating technologies on our equipment, changing from older technologies like cam switches to encoders, looking at the latest temperature controllers, or taking clients’ older, obsolete control systems and upgrading them.  

Honestly, it’s a never-ending challenge to just say, “Okay, what is the next thing that we can bring to our client,” whether it’s new equipment or a retrofit to an older piece of equipment that can save them some money, make their equipment more safe, or bring them in line with some of the regulatory committees that we see here on our end. Insurance and plant safety can be driving forces for these as well. We’re fortunate here to have such a technically diverse group; there’s a lot of support and it’s a complete package that we typically can offer our clients.  

Artificial Intelligence (18:10) 

Doug Glenn: So your answer made me think of one other question here, and that is artificial intelligence. AFC-Holcroft is on the cutting edge of technology. Are you using AI on the corporate level or having discussions about it? 

Artificial Intelligence

Tracy Dougherty: We’ve had discussions about it. Some of the discussions so far have been around where we want to use it, where we shouldn’t be using it, which platforms we should be using, and parameters to consider when using AI. 

We had a management meeting last fall up in northern Michigan, Harbor Springs, for the whole group, and we had an AI expert in for us who has worked with the US military for decades. It was a very interesting conversation. So, the short answer is yes. As a group, as a company, we’re looking at it, we’re using it in very minimal cases so far. It’s exciting and it’s scary at the same time.  

Doug Glenn: It really is. That’s a great way to summarize it. It’s like, “Wow, that’s fascinating and great.” And then you think, “Oh boy, what could it be used for?” 

Equipment Sustainability (19:47) 

Doug Glenn: Let’s talk about equipment for a bit, because I know the breadth of equipment and the types of equipment that you manufacture up to this point is very broad. Your equipment is primary air and atmosphere equipment, no real induction equipment that I know of, right? 

Tracy Dougherty: We had an induction company that was part of the group, EMA out of Europe, and we sold that division of the group. I think it was about a year ago or so. So we no longer have induction in the group. 

Doug Glenn: Most of your equipment is air and atmosphere equipment, continuous and batch, semi continuous. From a sustainability point of view, how are you handling upgrades to equipment, and what are you working on? 

Tracy Dougherty: Our modular products are one of our core products. They make up about half of our sales. We’re currently going through a review and upgrade to our modular products, such as the UBQs, the universal batch quench furnaces, the UBQAs, which is the same with the salt quench system, the easy generators, and all of the ancillary equipment associated with that.  

Our engineering team currently is undergoing an upgrade to those furnaces to make sure that we’re going through all of the design, because it’s a solid design. It’s been out there for a long time. We do quite well with it. It’s a very high performing piece of equipment. But we also know that we’re always looking at ways to make them more efficient, more robust, to make them better. We have a team that we’ve assembled to look at those designs and say, “Okay, where can we continually improve those products?”  

We’re doing the same thing with some of our continuous furnaces. Our mesh belt furnaces, for example, are currently undergoing an upgrade for sustainability. How can we save the atmosphere? How can we make them more energy efficient? How can we eliminate downtime through part mixing and some of these other strategies? So that’s also in our engineering team right now where we’re undergoing upgrades to the standard design for those components.  

Getting back to the group, we also have things that we’re doing here at AFC-Holcroft, as well as some of the group companies. As an example, we are looking into industrial waste heat recovery systems. We’re looking at ways to capture the waste heat from high heat furnaces and use that heat for a variety of things, whether it’s in northern climates in winter months, heating a facility, heating the wash water on a washer, a variety of things.  

While we’re doing that here at AFC-Holcroft, the group company is also looking at prototypes and other things for the industrial waste heat recovery systems. So, that’s another area where we’re always looking at ways to improve the equipment and the energy efficiency of the equipment. 

Atmosphere Consumption (25:45) 

Doug Glenn: Is AFC-Holcroft doing anything with your equipment regarding atmosphere consumption? 

Tracy Dougherty: Yes, absolutely. Part of the design upgrades that we’re looking at is the amount of atmosphere that we’re consuming, both on the continuous furnaces, as well as the batch furnaces. We have a high/ low Endo flow on our furnaces, the programmable recipe to go to high flow when you’re transferring a load but then go to a reduced flow. Then the generator supplies the demand based on the furnace’s demands. For the continuous furnaces, we are looking at the type of loading systems we’re putting on pusher furnaces or what we call an eco-box on a belt furnace, which is almost like a nitrogen curtain on the front. With belt furnaces, you have a throat on the front and the back and an opening of a large atmosphere box basically. 

We are looking at ways that we can reduce atmosphere consumption in the furnace by 20% to 30% in some cases.  

Doug Glenn: What is the eco-box that you refer to? 

Tracy Dougherty: It’s a small unit that sits on the charge end of a belt furnace that provides a “nitrogen curtain” on the lower end of the belt. It basically prevents the loss of atmosphere from the furnace itself. That along with unique throat designs that we’ve also tested and looked at are the updates that we are exploring. With any furnace, you’re running that thing 24/7, 365 days a year. Small gains can make a big difference 

Calibration Mode (28:08) 

Doug Glenn: We’ve discussed in the past or I’ve read on your website perhaps something called calibration mode. What is that? 

Tracy Dougherty: It’s a recipe. It’s a separate screen within our batch master system on our batch furnaces. When you put in a new furnace, you have all your presets on that furnace. So when we come in and we set it up and you start running, everything is set to operate to proper operating parameters — everything from the amount of time it takes the door to open and close, to the elevator up and down, to the atmosphere, to the heat up rates, and all of those parameters.  

Calibration mode, which we recently got a patent on, is a test cycle for heat treaters. If we start to see some variation in the hardness levels of the parts or there are other challenges, we can run calibration mode through the furnace. Basically, you put a load in the furnace, a dummy load or a scrap load, or you can run it without a load for that matter, but it’s best with a simulated load. You run it through that recipe, and it’ll give you red/green acceptable levels on every preset parameter for that furnace and be able to tell you whether your door has drifted, for example. So maybe you need to rebuild the seals on the cylinders, or it allows a heat treater to pinpoint reasons or areas where things have drifted from when that was a new furnace and a new install. 

Doug Glenn: It’s for batch furnaces, right? 

Tracy Dougherty: Correct. Right now, we use it on our batch equipment. It’s really a great selling tool for commercial heat treaters as well because if they have clients coming to them they are able to show on their batch equipment that they can identify if there’s any portion of this furnace that drifts away from when the parts were approved through the production part approval process (PPAP). They can see that through this calibration mode recipe. 

Carbon Emissions (30:56) 

Carbon Emissions

Doug Glenn: Has AFC-Holcroft ever been required or voluntarily done anything to measure emissions, carbon emissions most notably? 

Tracy Dougherty: We have within our group. One of our R&D projects within the AICHLEN Group is currently in the development of a carbon emission measuring system on a furnace line. It’s fairly well along at this point, but it’s a prototype that the group is working on. It’s something that is being driven much more in other parts of the world versus the U.S. currently. But I think these are the types of technologies that are coming down the pike so that we will be able to actually monitor and measure emissions on a furnace line. 

Electrically Heated LPC Furnace (31:56) 

Doug Glenn: Tracy or Ed, anything else on the equipment side that you want to mention as far as sustainability efforts? 

Tracy Dougherty: We do have an electrically heated low pressure carburizing (LPC) furnace that we’ve installed and commissioned recently as well. We just went through final acceptance on it. It has a 36 x 72 x 48 effective load size, and it has a 10,000-lb gross load capacity. In this case, it’s the LPC furnace that has a vacuum cooling chamber on it. It doesn’t have a quench currently, but that’s what we’re looking at offering to the industry as well. We have developed the LPC furnace successfully, and so now we have this furnace that we are going to be able to offer to the market that is interested in LPC. 

When it comes to certain parts, certain specifications that require no IGO (intergranular oxidation), we’ll be able to connect oil plants or salt plant systems to an LPC furnace, install it in an existing line, possibly an atmosphere UBQ line, and have it be fed by the same transfer car, but now also have the ability to do LPC with either oil or salt plants. 

Business Sustainability: Partnerships & Joint Ventures (33:40) 

Doug Glenn: I know we’re talking about sustainability, but we need to have business sustainability as well. AFC-Holcroft has had some interesting partnerships around the globe that I wanted to ask you about. The one that was most interesting to me was your AICHELIN ST Vacuum move that you’ve made recently and you mentioned. What is that? 

Tracy Dougherty: It’s a joint venture with System Technique, which is a Turkish-based company. This joint venture is to offer single dual chamber vacuum furnaces currently to the European market. They just installed a single chamber vacuum furnace in a body coat plant in Finland. 

The AICHELIN Group sees vacuum as something that we’d like to expand into, with what we’re doing over here with the LPC that I just mentioned along with this joint venture in Europe. We have a knowledge base in it. You may recall, AFC-Holcroft had about a 10-year joint venture with ALD out of Germany. So, we do have some of that tribal knowledge. It’s not completely new to us. We think we’ve got something to offer the industry with some unique features.  

Doug Glenn: Are you going to be offering that equipment in North America? 

Tracy Dougherty: Yes, we’re currently looking at strategies. Before we introduce it to the market, we want to make sure that we have a good strategy for not only where we’re going to build them, but how we’re going to service and support them from not only a service perspective, but spare parts, critical spare parts, and things like that. We’re going through that process now, but that is our eventual plan. 

Doug Glenn: For your service and aftermarket work, are you all in North America? Where do you roam? 

Edward Wykes: We service all of North America, and we also support our equipment in Europe when it makes more sense for us to do it than the AICHELIN service group.  

Doug Glenn: Do you send a team over?  

Heat Treat Radio #120 Still Image With Doug Glenn (Left), Ed Wykes (Center), Tracy Dougherty (Right)

Edward Wykes: We send employees over and/or do remote service, and we also work with AICHILEN Group to help some of our current clients. There’s a desire on their end to want to learn and understand and be able to service our equipment locally. We work with them on that as well. 

Doug Glenn: Is your service team able to do a lot of remote work?  

Edward Wykes: It’s more and more prevalent as technology advances that there’s a need for remote support, especially with a lot of the controls, upgrades, and these types of technology. This technology lends itself to being done remotely if there is a competent service team on-site at the client’s facility. 

Doug Glenn: Are most of your service team members employees or do you use subcontractors to do service. 

Edward Wykes: For the most part, our service team members are AFC employees. 

Doug Glenn: How many people do you have out in the field? 

Edward Wykes: We usually have anywhere from 5 to 7 people in the field. 

Doug Glenn: That’s a good crew. I understand that AFC-Holcroft is making some investments in the EV, electric vehicle, marketplace with a company in Japan and one in China. Can you tell us about that? 

Tracy Dougherty: The AICHELIN Group has a partnership with KILNPARTNER, which is a Chinese company, mostly for the European market. But if they were to run into a system that they need our assistance with, we have the ability to assist them as needed. That’s a partnership that’s been a few years in the making now.  

We recently signed a three-phase agreement with TOKAI KONETSU out of Japan. Phase one for us with TOKAI is to basically be the North American support team, assisting them in sales efforts, but then to also be here for the service support, commissioning, and installation of their systems. They’re running off a pusher type kiln for the battery powder market, the anode cathode battery powder market over in Japan. We’re sending a team over to go through some training with them to better understand their systems. For us, phase one is the ability to assist them in the North American market because it’s difficult for anybody to penetrate a market if you don’t have local service and support.  

Doug Glenn: The last one I wanted to ask you about was this one in Japan, Sanken Sangyo, with multi-level rotary furnaces for solution, aging, and tempering. 

Tracy Dougherty: Yes, we have had that one in place for a couple of years now. The market is a little soft for that. It’s specific to rotary multi-level rotary solution and age systems, as you said, d5 t6 aging systems. They’re used in the manufacturing of aluminum wheels, blocks, and heads. With the heavy EV push, of course, there’s a good amount of capacity built up for those things. But the opportunities there right now are a little bit soft.  

We’re also looking at that particular furnace design for other ferrous applications, tempering applications in ferrous, because they take up a much smaller footprint. Sometimes, you have these very long belts or chain conveyor tempering type systems that can take up a lot of floor space. Tempering ferrous applications are a very efficient alternative. We have one that we’re looking at now, which is a tempering ferrous application, that we think will fit that very nicely.  

That’s another partnership that is set up very similarly because they, being a Japanese company, have a difficult time over here without having somebody local. It’s a little different in that it’s not a phased approach. We’re going to build the systems over here, right out of the chute. We’ll build them over here, we’ll install them, we’ll service them, and then they will support us from an engineering and reference perspective. 

Conclusion (41:47) 

Doug Glenn: We’ve talked a little bit about sustainability services and sustainability equipment. Then I wanted to take a quick note on some of these partnerships that you had. It’s interesting when you’re working with international companies, like you said, a parent company in Austria, you have partnerships in China, Japan, all over the globe. You get the perspective, especially on the sustainability side. It is being done a lot more in Europe especially, so you have a unique position.  

Thank you for your time today and for sharing your expertise.  

Tracy Dougherty: One more thing I wanted to mention on the on the partnership side of things. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our partnership with Mattsa down in Mexico. It’s kind of the other end of the spectrum. With Mattsa, we’re almost extensions of each other. We’re actually going down there this this fall in October to celebrate our 35-year anniversary of working together with the Mattsa team.  

About the Guests

Tracy Doughterty
President & CEO
AFC Holcroft

Tracy Dougherty received a degree in Tool & Die Design in 1984 and worked for 15 years in the metal fabrication/stamping industry in various positions. He has experience as a tool & die designer, applications engineer, and manufacturing engineer before transitioning into a sales role. He worked in materials handling, robotics, and automation capital equipment before starting with AFC Holcroft in 2008. He is currently the president/CEO of AFC Holcroft.   

Ed Wykes
Director of Field Service and Aftermarket Sales
AFC Holcroft

Ed Wykes completed a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration with a minor in Business Administration from Kettering University in 1998. He began his career as a Manufacturing Engineer at General Motors in 1998. In the years following he held positions as an Automotive Market Manager, Account Manager, Sr. Marketing/Sales Engineer, and Program Manager. He started at AFC-Holcroft as a Mechanical Engineering Manager before becoming Director of Field Services.  

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

Heat Treat Radio #120: Exploring Sustainable Practices in Heat Treating Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #119: Solvent vs. Aqueous Cleaning: Choosing the Best Method for Your Process

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO, Manufacturing Heat Treat Technical Content, PARTS CLEANING TECHNICAL-CONTENT

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, host Doug Glenn sits down with Fernando Carminholi, the business development manager at Hubbard-Hall, to discuss solvent and aqueous cleaners and why cleaning is a crucial step in both pre and post thermal processing to ensure quality part outcomes. Fernando offers practical guidance, discusses solvent vs. aqueous cleaning methods, common pitfalls, and upcoming EPA regulations that could impact the industry.

From production to engineering to quality, there are valuable insights for everyone on optimizing cleaning process for better part quality, longer furnace life, and maintaining compliance in the latest regulatory environment.

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

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn: Welcome to Heat Treat Radio. I would like to start off with some parts cleaning basics. Do all parts need to be heat treated? Why do we do cleaning? And what are the risks of not cleaning?

General Parts Cleaning (01:40)

Fernando Carminholi: Thank you for this opportunity to talk about cleaners and the importance of cleaning. We’re going to focus on the cleaning before the heat treat, but there is also a cleaner after the heat treat when you remove quenching agents.

You asked how to know if parts need to be cleaned. And my answer to that is “yes,” and it could be “maybe” as well. The “maybe” is because some really light oily parts with light oil go to the furnace and there is not a problem. I would say that maybe 10% of all the parts heat treated do not need cleaned in any kind of operation. They go from stamping or deep drawing straight to the furnace.

But the rest — the 90% — will require cleaning. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

Approximately 30%–35% will pass through a solvent cleaning. When we’re talking about solvent cleaning, there are two different ways to clean parts. One is the well-known technology of open-top degreasers. You have your solvent in a proper tank, and then you have some chillers on top to hold the vapor; this is called a “vapor degreaser.” You see a lot of these machines on the market from the 80s and 90s.

Another way to use solvents is in a closed vacuum machine, which is a more technologically updated machine.

And the rest of parts, I would say more than 50%, are cleaned in water-based cleaners, which could be in a spray application, a spiral tunnel, or immersion.

And normally, what kind of oils do we clean? As the years go on, there are new regulations for the oils with all the modernization. Every year the R&Ds work with new kinds of oils — cooling fluids, rust inhibitors, forming lubricants, and deep drawing compounds. Plus, they could be synthetic, and every year the oils become more difficult to remove. That’s the big challenge for the cleaning operation.

Doug Glenn: I assume the solvents must keep up with the changes in the chemistry of the cleaners?

Fernando Carminholi: Sure. Both of the systems have to keep up: the solvents and the aqueous.

Doug Glenn: If I’m hearing you right, Fernando, you’re saying that probably 90% of parts in in the heat treat process are cleaned. Maybe 35% of those get solvent-based cleaning and the rest aqueous-based.

I’ve heard that there are various reasons why we clean. Obviously if you’re going into a vacuum furnace, there are different reasons for why you clean than if you’re going into an air and atmosphere furnace. You’re wanting to make sure you don’t drag all those contaminants into a vacuum furnace. That’s one reason why you clean, right?

Fernando Carminholi: Exactly. But most will be more atmospheric furnaces. And then what do you drag in? Most of the clients we’re talking about move high volumes inside the furnace.

Let’s think about it in two different ways. If you don’t clean at all, or you have a bad cleaning, what is the problem? If you don’t have a cleaner at all because it’s a really light, clean oil and part that doesn’t drag that much oil, it could be fine.

But let’s think about a big operation with lots of oil, maybe fasteners or a kind of part that carries more oil to the furnace; it will produce a lot of drag and it will burn. You will have furnace contamination that will contaminate the oxygen and the carbon — it can cause decarbonization which can affect the hardness and the mechanical properties of the parts. The easiest way to see that this is happening is if there is a lot of smoke, which is common.

Fasteners that may carry more oil to the furnace

Doug Glenn: It is common. And one thought I had is not only will it potentially affect the parts, but it can impact the life of your furnace because you’re getting a lot of contamination, it’s going to need more maintenance, and you can damage your furnace.

Fernando Carminholi: Definitely. It will need more maintenance and shorten the life of the furnace. The smoke can also cause an uneven heat distribution inside the furnace and can lead to warping, cracks, and inconsistent hardness on the part. And that’s the result of no cleaning at all.

Now look at it another way. If you have the cleaner, machine-cleaning solvents or water based, and somehow you’re not cleaning the parts well, you can drag more than oil to the furnace. You can drag other compounds. With water-based cleaners in particular, you can drag the rinses together with all the chemicals.

And you have a different areas, like in nitriding or FNC operations, where the area with the oil that was not cleaned well will suffer some soft spots and unformed hardness — like the opposite of using sunscreen on the beach. You can cause surface defects like heating stains and areas that are well heat treated as well as areas where the structure is not as expected.

Doug Glenn: It’s almost like unintentionally using a stop-off paint on your part.

I want people who may not have dealt with parts cleaning in the past to hear some of these things: Not all parts need cleaned. A good number of parts do. If oil on the surface, or contamination, or spottiness on the finish of the part is not an issue, then you may not need to wash. But a very large percentage of parts that are heat treated do get washed in either solvents or aqueous-based, water-based solvents. And it’s good for the life of your furnace, the interior furnace, the maintenance of your furnace, and the properties of the parts.

Legislation (11:40)

I want to move on to a second topic that I thought would be very enlightening to some of our more experienced parts cleaning people. That is the area of legislation that Hubbard-Hall is aware of that’s going to be coming down the pike that we need to be aware of. Can you talk a little bit about the legislation regarding parts cleaning?

Fernando Carminholi: When we’re talking about legislation, everything that the EPA stated, let’s separate again into two different topics: water based and solvent based. When we’re talking about water-based cleaners, you have to watch out for what kind of raw materials you’re using.

What is the cleaner formulation? Because if you don’t rinse well, that’s something that you need to control in your process. If you don’t rinse well, you’re going to be dragging a lot of those materials. That can cause all the problems that we’ve already talked about. But legislation for water-based cleaners is less problematic.

I would like to wave a red flag right now because if you’re working with some product that will be restricted, you need to change.

And then, for example, you have some restrictions with some surfactants. And it’s based, but, for example, none of the latest. All those new formulations, I would say that they’re already free of.

Another big topic to discuss, and something that everyone is talking about now, is products containing PFAS. It could be in both a water-based cleaner and in the solvent.

Doug Glenn: What are those two things that you mentioned?

Fernando Carminholi: PFAS are fluorinated compounds. You see a lot of these in Teflon based, fire extinguisher foam, and in a lot of different things in the industry. These are forever chemicals. So far there is not a good, stable way to treat and eliminate these chemicals from the drinking water. This is something that the industry is regulating: how to treat and how to waste those chemicals because some of those compounds.

We’re talking about PPT (part per trillion); it’s a really low amount in the drinking water. But this is something to watch out for on the chemicals. This is something that is already suffering restriction, and it’s a hot topic.

Doug Glenn: Are these rules that are coming down federally based or are they state based?

Fernando Carminholi: These are federal. If you look up PFAS, all the surface finishing world and the wastewater world is talking about them. If you look at Congress, a lot of regulations from the government are talking about maybe having different states with different numbers. This is something that is already defining the rules and defining how to analyze and how to treat it.  

Hubbard-Hall already does PFAS-free manufacturing. We decided not to work in this way.

I would like to switch gears a little bit here. With regulations, normally we talk more about the solvents. The solvents we’re talking about — methylene chloride, TCE (trichloroethylene), perchloroethylene, propyl mide — are the halogenated solvents that are already on the list. The EPA is working on this already.

I have a cheat sheet with some numbers I would like to bring up. If you go on the Hubbard-Hall website, you can find this table. To create this chart, we took all the regulations and put them in one table for different solvents.  When the EPA rule was stated, for example, methylene chloride is already finishing. The rule was dated March 2024. All companies have until March 2026 to stop using this solvent as a cleaner. 

Click the image for more information

There are exceptions. For example, if you use them for NASA or federal use, you have a little bit more time. For TCE, you have less than one year; by January 2026th, you’re not going to be able to use TCE as a vapor degreaser.

There are some alternatives for that. If you’re using an open-top machine, fluorinated solvents are an alternative; they have low global warming potential and are non-flammable, stable products. Those are available on the market.

Another alternative is modified alcohol, which is the best choice. This is a formulated alcohol. It’s not a book solvent. It’s a formulated product. It has a good cleaning ability and a good permeability because that’s the beauty of the solvent. It can go between the parts or inside the holes to clean everything. And modified alcohols can be used in the vacuum cleaning machine. It will work almost the same as the vacuum furnace. But on the cleaning side you have all the equipment running in a vacuum and you have a distillation process that will remove oil and the water from the part.

Doug Glenn: I’m curious about that chart that we were looking at. As you know, most of our readers and listeners are manufacturers who have their own in-house heat treating and we get a lot of commercial heat treaters, too. But our core audience are those manufacturers who have their own in-house heat treat. How many of them do you think are using either solvent or water-based solutions that are going to be ruled out by these regulations?

Fernando Carminholi: I would say that today 20% use halogenated solvents that need to be ruled out and switched for another technology. In some states, such as New York and Minnesota, this is already in place. They cannot use them. But the final date rule to be enacted, for example, for TCE would be January of 2026.

The unique one that is just proposed but is not finalized yet is the NPB. I think that will take between 3–5 years to be fully restricted.

Doug Glenn: It seems safe to say that there’s a significant number of people out there currently using cleaning solvents that will be outlawed over the next 3–5 years, so they need to start looking for another technology?

Fernando Carminholi: I would like to wave a red flag right now because if you’re working with some product that will be restricted, you need to change. Or use the same equipment. But as I told you, the fluorinated solvent would be 3–4 times more expensive.

On the other hand, if you’re going to buy equipment to use modified alcohol, there are not that many equipment manufacturers and that’s the limit. If 20% of this market needs to change, they will expect to change six months before. I would say that today you have equipment manufacturing expecting to deliver equipment in six months.

Doug Glenn: People need to keep in mind the lead time that they’re not going to get that equipment that quickly.

Aqueous Based vs. Solvent Cleaners (25:07)

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump in and talk about the pros and cons of using aqueous (or water-based) versus solvent cleaners. What’s the difference and why would we choose one over the other?

Fernando Carminholi: This is a really extensive debate. You can see some videos at the Hubbard-Hall website talking about this. What I see in the market is that companies selling only solvent will always talk poorly about the water-based. Companies that sell only water-based products are talking bad about the solvents and regulations.

I would say that Hubbard-Hall plays on both sides. We understand the best usage for different applications. I would try to go on the really high level. “Hey, I am the solvent side; I need to keep on the solvent side.” Or, “I need to go for a water based.”

First of all, you need to understand the contamination. What kind of oil? We’re talking about the cooling fluid, rust inhibitor, dip drawing, a lot of heavy, chlorinated oil, whether it contains sulfur, or whether it is a polar or nonpolar-based — that would decide what kind of solvent or water-based product you’re going to use. Normally, when you have an oil-based hydrocarbon, it tends to be easier to remove with solvents. When you have a water-based cooling agent or rust inhibitor, that’s easier to remove with a water base. This is one thing to consider, but it doesn’t mean that if you have a hydrocarbon you cannot remove it with water.

A discussion about waste and cost of parts cleaning

Another thing that you need to take a look at is the part geometry. If it is a flat part, it’s easy to remove oils with a spray. Or you may need ultrasonics to remove oils if there are a lot of blind holes and parts really close to each other. That’s an advantage of going to the solvents here because even if you use a really good surfactant, which will change the surface tension, the solvent tends to have a much better permeability — that’s the term for cleaning the really deep holes and the parts really close to each other.

Another thing to consider is I would call overall the EHS. That means what is the company? Is it okay to use inside the factory? Do I need VOCs? Do I need aqueous to be VOC free? For solvents you need to check how flammable they are.

Waste in Cleaning (29:07)

When we’re talking about waste and footprint — what is the difference between the systems? The footprint for solvent is smaller because all you need is the degreaser machine, open top or vacuum cleaner. You clean and you dry. Normally, the drying process is way easier with the solvent.

Plus, you don’t have all the other processes needed for the water based. All the waste generated from the solvent that you have is possibly some water that came from the water-based rust inhibitor or even the oil or some cleaner that is already gone. You have this weighed and then you send for a partner that will pick it up and take care of the waste.

For aqueous, this is different. You will need rinses. You will need a temperature to dry. You need blowers; you need heaters. The o-rings [ET1] may be needed to dry the parts, and that’s a problem. If you leave the water behind, it can lead to corrosion, for example. So that’s a big difference between solvent and water-based.

Doug Glenn: The reason the solvent is not an issue so much with the drag out, where you keep part of the cleaning solution on the products, is because of evaporation? Solvents evaporate much quicker than water.

Fernando Carminholi: Yes, that’s right. That’s why old open-top vapor machines could be a problem because the EPA [MS2] [JM3] tightens limits every year. When you have an old machine with chillers on the top, you have the vapor phase, which is when you heat up your solvent. And then you have the chillers, which is the coil to condensate back. If the chiller is not working well, the solvency will go to the atmosphere. At the end, when you take out your part, it will dry up really easily. When you go for the closed system, you don’t have this emission.

That is another big difference between solvent and water-based. When you have a machine based on the solvent, you feel the machine. Normally, we’re talking about five to ten drums of product, and the consumption is really low. Clients spend one drum every 2 or 3 months for solvent depending on the system. For aqueous, you need all the rinses. So every time that you run a load, you go through the rinse, and you drag solution out of your tank, so the consumption will be higher for water based.

The Cost Debate (33:07)

Doug Glenn: So as far as variable cost, your aqueous system might have a higher operational cost?

Fernando Carminholi: That’s another good debate. The operational costs need to include the equipment as well.

Doug Glenn: I was going to ask about the difference between capital equipment costs. You said the solvent is a smaller footprint, does that mean it is a lower price?

Fernando Carminholi: Yes, I would say for the aqueous, if you need to include ultrasonic, for example, because you need an invasive way to use the waves to clean the parts, it will increase the cost. However, normally the cycles for the water based are lower. You can produce more parts.

No clear winner here when talking about cost

For example, if you were cleaning parts in a plant that already has a wastewater system, you will need to treat the water (possibly 1 to 2 gallons per minute depending on the flow rate on the rinses). This water needs to be treated before it is dumped into the sewage. You also need to follow the regulations and the limits.

But the cost overall depends on the parts. If we start to talk about cost, there’s a big difference now. Not that long ago, before Covid, water used to be cheap. But now water is very expensive. Energy is very expensive. Waste is very, very, very expensive. Then if you take all this rework, it is unacceptable. We like to say, cleaners can be cheap, but poor cleaning is always expensive.

The cleaning process will be cheaper than the heat treated part or even the steel or grinding or blasting. If you take the overall cost, cleaning is nothing. But if you don’t do the best that you can do, it can cause a huge problem, and that’s one thing to keep in mind.

Doug Glenn: Product failure, most notably. The more critical the part, the more important to make sure it’s cleaned.

Is it safe to say there’s no clear winner here when we talk about cost of equipment versus cost of operation for aqueous or solvent?

Fernando Carminholi: It really depends on the parts, the level of cleanliness that you want, and the kind of oil you’re using.

If you have a part that cannot be cleaned with aqueous because there’s a lot of holes and you need to clean inside the holes or the parts are close together, then there is no comparison. But you can bring up a lot of factors and put them side-by-side.

Solvent could be more expensive because of the chemical consumption, but for aqueous you need more equipment. When you’re talking about a vacuum cleaning machine, it will be a substantial capital expense for the equipment — over $1 million.

I’m seeing equipment manufacturers for the vacuum washing machine. They’re looking at the market and they see the problem of the mix of oils and cooling and you can use what they call a hybrid system. On the same machine you can use water-based fluid and then go to the solvent fluid. That’s a new feature in the market.

Doug Glenn: That’s very interesting. It’s a hybrid piece of equipment that starts with an aqueous wash and then finishes up maybe with a solvent washer?

Fernando Carminholi: Exactly.

Cleaning and the Environment (39:03)

Doug Glenn: Let’s move on to the fourth and final topic. I want to wrap up this third thing that we’re talking about as far as the pros and cons of aqueous versus solvent. If a listener has questions about which system makes the most sense for them, I’m sure your team at Hubbard-Hall can help them answer that question.

Fernando Carminholi: The best way to evaluate is to get a picture of your situation. We look at your costs, the pros and cons that you have today, your timeline for changing, whether you’re solvent regulated, for example.

We can do a scenario on how much you’re going to spend on the new line if you need a new line. We do have a prototype line where we can run some tests, different cleaners or solvent, or open-top machine. We can run different scenarios, evaluate the costs, and find a more environmentally friendly solution.

Doug Glenn: The last question I do want to ask you is about the cleaning process. How do we make it more efficient, profitable, and environmentally friendly?

Fernando Carminholi: The chemical manufacturers look it up in different ways. Let’s start with the solvent. Like I told you, there are a few. It’s a really low drag out. But it is dependent on the solvent, especially talking about modified alcohol. All the oil that you bring on the part could contain product that would change the pH of the chemical, and it could go really acidic or it could go really alkaline. That will screw up your machine; that will attack your parts. So, you lost the solution. You can have problems with the seal casket. You can attack the parts if you go acidic.

There are some ways to extend the life, and then you can analyze the solvent. You can add some stabilizers to continuously use the same solution because this is a fairly new technology. About ten years ago, the chemical manufacturers developed way better stabilizers to handle these new kinds of oil that we mentioned to extend the shelf life or the life of the solvent as much as we can. That’s a big savings.

On the aqueous side, what can be done? The problem here is why you dump your process.  It’s because oil as well. Hubbard-Hall does work with a feature that’s a piece of equipment that is a membrane filtration. We built this equipment internally. We have sold it to many clients already. This technology has been on the market for 40 years; it’s well tested. This technology filters the oil out of the cleaner to extend the life of the cleaner.

I will give one example. We have a client with parts that are brake calipers. They need to dump the cleaners every 2–3 weeks. That’s a cost to put chemicals is a cost to treat. With the membrane filtration, it’s been more than five years without dumping the solution.

We understand that it recovers like 98% of the cleaner in the future oil that you don’t need. This changes the cost a lot. That’s why there are a lot of variables that we can put on the equation. That’s why I ask listeners with this problem that if you’re looking for the solution, we’re more than happy to jump in and evaluate one system or another and compare costs for what you have.

Doug Glenn: Does that membrane filtration system you’re talking about work on both solvent and water based?

Fernando Carminholi: No, normally the solvent has the distillation process to separate the solvent, the water, and the oil.

The main drain will work only on the water based and when you use product that will emulsify the oil. And emulsifying means the cleaner is able to mix the oil and the water like you see in milk when you have 2% of fat.

Doug Glenn: All right. Well, Fernando, I really appreciate your time and your being here.

Fernando Carminholi: Thank you for this opportunity. I hope that all the subscribers understand a little bit more clearly how important the cleaning process is before the heat treat.

About The Guest

Fernando Carminholi
Business Development Manager
Hubbard-Hall

Fernando Carminholi is the business development manager at Hubbard-Hall, a six-generation family business that develops, services, and supplies specialty chemicals for ferrous and non-ferrous metals. A chemical engineer graduate from E.S.P.M. in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he oversees the company’s distribution channels and business development team. Fernando has extensive experience in the chemical specialty products industry for surface finishing, focusing on industrial parts cleaning, metal pre-treatment, and functional electroplating.

Contact Fernando at fcarminholi@hubbardhall.com.

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Heat Treat Today Welcomes Industry Innovator Heather Falcone

/ HEAT TREAT NEWS

Heat Treat Today is excited to announce the addition of Heather Falcone to the editorial and podcast team, beginning on Monday, March 3, 2025. She will be taking on the responsibilities of content editor for the daily e-newsletter, original content writer, and Heat Treat Radio contributor.

Heather Falcone
Content Editor/Content Writer/Heat Treat Radio Contributor
Heat Treat Today

Heather, the founder and principal of Falcone Consulting, LLC, is a servant leader with over 20 years of experience in heat treating, brazing, and chemical processing. She spent most of her formative years as a second-generation member of a family-owned heat treating and brazing business. As the former CEO of Thermal-Vac Technology, she successfully led the company through the pandemic, ensuring stability while propelling it into a new era that resulted in a successful exit in 2024. Passionate about challenging the status quo, she champions diverse teams and fair chance hiring, with a focus on developing successful teams that are future-proof and thriving. 

Beyond her position as founder and principal at newly formed Falcone Consulting LLC, Heather is a board member, coach, speaker, and writer, advocating for small businesses, workforce development, and success for the heat treat community at large. She provides her expertise in aerospace specifications and the Nadcap process in an ongoing role as the special project consultant for Cook Induction Heating in Maywood, California. Additionally, she has played a pivotal role in industry organizations like the Metal Treating Institute, AMEC, and Nadcap, while also supporting local nonprofits such as Chrysalis and the Orange County Workforce Development Board. 

“We’re thankful to have Heather joining the Heat Treat Today team,” said Doug Glenn, founder, owner, and publisher of Heat Treat Today. “I’ve known Heather for many years and have been impressed with her initiative, courage, and fearlessness in everything she does. As an organization that is deeply invested in making sure in-house heat treaters have the information they need to become more efficient and profitable, Heather will be an excellent addition to our editorial team. She knows the industry; she knows what our readers need. And as we all know, the happier the readers, the happier our advertisers.”

Heather is an Ironman triathlete, a Seven Summits enthusiast who has summitted Mt. Kilimanjaro and trekked in the Everest region, and a loving wife and mother to two teenage boys.

For more information, click here for Heather’s LinkedIn page, here for Falcone Consulting’s website, or here for her Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 recognition in 2019.

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Heat Treat Radio #118: Saving Dollars with Ceramic Fiber Insulation

/ ATMOSPHERE AIR FURNACES TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, INSULATION TECHNICAL CONTENT, Manufacturing Heat Treat Technical Content

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, Mark Rhoa, Jr. from Chiz Bros, a company specializing in ceramic fiber products, discusses insulation with host Doug Glenn. Mark focuses on the benefits of ceramic fiber in industrial applications. The conversation covers decarbonization, the importance of insulation and thermal shock resistance, the shift to electrically heated modules, and practical maintenance tips for ceramic fiber-insulated furnaces.

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

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:30) 

Doug Glenn: I want to welcome our guest today: Mark Rhoa Jr. from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Mark’s been involved with the industry for quite a while with Chiz Bros, our sponsor for today. Mark is also a Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 honoree from the Class of 2021. And, Mark, could you tell me who started your company — your dad or your dad and his brother? I don’t know the history that well.

Mark Rhoa: My dad actually joined the company in ‘97, but when he joined, Chiz Bros. had been around for a good 30 years or so. It was started by the Chiz brothers originally: Al, Ray, and John Chiz. As they got older and some of them moved on from the company to retire, my dad took over the company in 2014, and that’s when I came on board.

I’ve been here about ten years. And Ray Chiz Jr. just recently retired; he is one of the original owners’ sons who was working here running our warehouse. He’s the last with the Chiz name to work here. We say that the Chiz haircut is kind of what I’ve got going on. You can know by the haircut there’s a lot of Chiz’s still working here, and you might even be an honorary.

Doug Glenn: I can be an honorary, for sure. I don’t have enough on the side.

Chiz has been around for 50 some years doing specialty solutions for refractory applications in the metals, power, glass, and ceramics industries. And you guys deal with multinational companies as well as the small Ma and Pa shop furnace manufacturers or heat treaters/thermal processors, a pretty good mix. You’ve got great customer service, reasonable pricing, and quick delivery. And I know you and I have talked about how you guys pride yourselves on having a lot of stuff in stock. And finally, you guys have your Pittsburgh location and are also in Detroit, which is a relatively new addition, right?

Mark Rhoa: Yeah, about two years ago we opened up a Detroit warehouse. We’ve always had some good clients up that way. You’ve got to have some boots on the ground to be super effective. I say to get the easy orders you’ve got to have the stuff on the ground to get the hard orders, which are the phone calls at 5 o’clock on a Friday saying, “Hey, we need to pick this up because the furnace is down.” And we didn’t have that opportunity to improve our customer service up there before opening that location.

We try to punch above our weight to compete with the big guys on pricing. We make sure we’re always still answering the phone.

Doug Glenn: It makes a huge difference when you’ve actually got people answering the phone.

My understanding is that you provide castables, fibers, brick, etc. But today we want to hone in a little bit on ceramic fiber.

Mark Rhoa: Ceramic fiber is the big portion of our business. We’re one of the biggest Unifrax (Alkegen) ceramic fiber distributors in the country. So, a lot of what we do is being driven by ceramic fiber products we supply. We still can supply castables, bricks, and everything in between. But ceramic fiber drives the ship for us.

What Is Ceramic Fiber? (04:58)

Doug Glenn: Let’s talk about that. Most of our listeners are folks with their own in-house heat treat. But let’s assume we’ve got some people watching that don’t know some basics.

Tell us about ceramic fiber: What is it? How is it made? What are we using it for?

Mark Rhoa: I describe it to people who may not know much about it by comparing it to the Pink Panther insulation that people may recognize up in their roof or in their walls. Ceramic fiber is white, but picture that insulation for 2300°F. That’s what ceramic fiber is, and it’s a form that we sell the most of right now.

Ceramic fiber

You can take that and cut gaskets out of it. You can form it into hard boards through a vacuum forming process. You can take it folded into what we call ceramic fiber modules; your furnace probably has modules in it if it’s a traditional gas-fired or electric furnace. Ceramic fiber products typically aren’t used on the vacuum side of things. People with all vacuum furnaces are probably not going to be using ceramic fiber. There are cloths that are ceramic fiber based as well. There’s a bunch of other ways it’s used.

Ceramic fiber is made of a blown, spun glass. Essentially what you’re doing is dropping the liquid aluminum silica mixture, and it gets blown or blown and spun at super high temperatures. I’m not going to get into the details of the differences there, but whether the stream is blown or is spun on wheels will determine the tensile strength of blanket.

In the grand scheme of things, what you’re doing is collecting all that fiber and getting it onto a mechanism that’s moving along a conveyor belt. Then it’s getting needled from each side to interlock the fibers to make a 26” wide blanket. It’s going to be trimmed off an inch when it goes through, and at the end you have a 24” wide x 1” thick, 8-pound density roll coming out.

Those densities can vary based on how much fiber is going into it. It’s pounds per cubic foot. But when you’re using a 1” thick piece, it’s divided by twelve from a weight standpoint. The fiber you’re needling in there determines the density.

And there are slightly different chemistries for 2300°F, 2600°F, and the most expensive would be 3000°F polycrystalline. The process to make that is a little bit different, too.

But most people are probably more interested in what we’re doing with it. What’s the Chris Farley line in Tommy Boy? We’ll keep it PG, but “take a butcher’s word for it” — take our word for it; it’s made the right way.

Now we can get into how it’s actually used.

Doug Glenn: It’s basically like insulation in your house, like you said. That’s probably the best description of it for people that need to know. But it can obviously go to a much higher temperature.

In an industrial setting, why would you use fiber versus a castable or brick?

Why Fiber? (08:28)

Mark Rhoa: Ceramic fiber is a great insulator. We’ll probably get into why a better insulator is important for decarbonization efforts and things like that.

It’s certainly a better insulator than castables, easy to install, and easy to use. The main reason it’s preferred is for its insulating value and ability to have varying temperature ranges, which you can certainly do with castables and brick.

But to put brick in a wall 12” thick, for argument’s sake, you will need four layers of 3” brick on there. With ceramic fiber, you can take one 12” x 12” module, shoot it onto the shell, attach it, and be good to go from there.

The main thing would be longevity and stuff like thermal shock value. One of the things you have to worry about with castables and brick — maybe not as much with IFB but standard brick — is the heat cycling. Heat treat furnaces are a great example of that.

That door is opening up a lot, so the air is coming in there. People probably see it in their furnaces. The castable is going to want to crack because it’s not designed for thermal shock like ceramic fiber is.

There are certainly applications that you wouldn’t want to use ceramic fiber for. If you’re looking at a traditional heat treat furnace, it depends on how the load is supported: If the floor is the refractory, it is actually supporting the load, and you’re going to want some sort of brick, some sort of castable. Fiber is going to be soft, compressed, and get beat up. You can’t necessarily put it everywhere, but there are areas where it may be up for debate on.

You can use a brick or you can use fiber in the wall. Traditionally, you’re going to use fiber for the insulated value, thermal shock value, installation, and weight; it’s a lot lighter.

A lot of heat treating furnaces are small compared to the massive furnaces in steel melting. They’re going to ship heat treating furnaces. With ceramic fiber, a 12” x 12” fiber module, 12” thick, weighing roughly 12–14 lbs. is 5–10x lighter than brick or castable.

Repairability (10:51)

Doug Glenn: How about addressing the repairability issues between castable and brick and fiber?

Mark Rhoa: Fiber, especially if you’re getting into higher temperatures, can have some shrinkage to it. But you’re able to repair fiber a lot easier. If you wreck a little bit of fiber, you can get in there and get it repaired quickly. With a brick or castable everything’s tied together as either a monolithic piece or a bunch of bricks that are connected, it can start to become a house of cards scenario where you pull and one goes down then everything goes down.

Doug Glenn: It’s like a Jenga game. You pull that brick out on the bottom and what happens?

Figure 2. “You don’t want to pull out the wrong brick.”

Mark Rhoa: Yeah, you don’t want to pull the wrong brick.

Doug Glenn: You already mentioned the temperature ranges we’re talking about. The standard bottom temperature is 2300°F; the fibers are good up to 2300°F. Then you’ve got 2600°F and then 3000°F. Is that roughly the breakdown when you’re looking at fibers?

Mark Rhoa: I don’t know why they ended up doing this, but for 2300°F ceramic fiber, realistically you only want to use it to 2150°F. That goes along with the shrinkage curve of it. I forget the exact number, but I think it’s like in 24 hours, you get less than 3% shrinkage. Typically, the rule of thumb is that you don’t want to use that full temperature range; you want to give yourself 150°F of cushion to be safe. It will still have shrinkage after that up to that temperature.

I don’t know who ever thought of that; it was probably some genius marketing guy to get a little extra.

Fiber Shrinkage (12:57)

Doug Glenn: You’ve mentioned shrinkage a couple different times. Why does that happen with ceramic fiber? And how does that impact installation?

Mark Rhoa: When ceramic fiber hits its operating temperatures, it shrinks up. On the chemistry side, I don’t have an answer there. But we factor in compression to help alleviate when something shrinks. It’s already pushing out against something. It still keeps its resiliency (it wants to pop back out), and that’s factored into every design. 

If you’re doing 12” modules, you’ll have a batten strip between them. That makes up for some of the shrinkage that may come where there’s not compression. Any sort of design we would do, or probably anyone would do, is going to factor in shrinkage. You don’t want to just put something in there, and when it shrinks, it leaves a gap. You want to make sure you have something in there that’s going to fill that gap; and that’s typically for modules.

Now if you’re getting to a low temperature, we’re talking about a furnace at 1200°F, you’re not going to have to worry about shrinkage. Even in some of those furnaces, you’ll see designs we call wallpaper — a pin’s exposed and you’re layering on top of it. You’re just kind of overlapping gaps, but you’re not going to have any shrinkage there, so you don’t really have to worry.

Figure 3. Avoiding gaps when shrinkage occurs

Doug Glenn: There is one question I did want to ask you when we were talking about the different temperature ranges of 2300°F, 2600°F, and 3000°F. Are the chemistries between those different?

Mark Rhoa: They’re all alumina silica based. 2300°F is like 50% alumina and 40% silica. They’ll typically inject some zirconia in it, maybe around 15% zirconia. That gives it the extra boost. Alumina is what drops down.

We don’t want to get into every example, but it does have a lower aluminum content. Sometimes in aluminum melting you can get some flexing because there’s zirconia in there, so you need to know the exact application.

And then the polycrystalline, what people call the 3000°F, would be 72% alumina. And that’s made in a calcined process. The 72% alumina is the key factor.

You can also have super high aluminum blankets. Saffil® is the typical brand name. And that’s a 95% plus alumina. That’s for high hydrogen atmospheres, stuff where there’s bad attacking, bad off gassing. The alumina is usually more resilient to that. Some aerospace applications have that stuff spected in for effectiveness and also because they probably have government money. Why not pay for the highest quality, most expensive thing, right?

Electric Element Modules (18:32)

Doug Glenn: You mentioned modules before, but I want to take a little bit of a different angle. The modules you were talking about have no type of heating element in them. They’re just simply the insulating modules that you put on the side of the wall, side by side, maybe alternating the orientation. But what I want to talk about are electric element modules. Can you describe what those are and why you are using them? And maybe hit on the decarbonization or electrification element of those?

Mark Rhoa: Traditional fiber modules are used in a gas furnace, even an electric furnace that may be heated by glow bars or radiant tubes or something like that. That’s going to have a similar penetration there.

One of the systems we call our ELE system. I’d say in the last two years we’ve probably had as many inquiries or conversations about going to these electrically heated modules than we have in the past 5–10 years combined. A lot of that has to do with companies wanting to get away from gas, or they’ve got pressures for different environmental or cost saving reasons.

What we’re doing with that is hanging the elements on the ceramic fiber module. And when they show the pictures of this one, there’ll be one in there. But that allows us to do a modular system where they can get a lot of power on those walls, and it lets us keep a lot of the same insulating value from using modules without having to use brick or a super heavy element in the sidewalls for support.

Electric Element Modules

When someone says we’re putting this many BTUs of gas; here’s the load, size, weight. We do the electric calculations to see how many kilowatts of power we need to pump into this furnace and elements in order to heat something up just like you would do with gas.

And rest assured, someone a lot smarter than me does those calculations. I’m just a pretty face that gets to sell them. But this is something that we’re seeing a lot of. There’s a big push coming from the government and boards of directors.

Doug Glenn: It’s going to help companies reduce their carbon footprint if that is their desire.

I have a question for you about those and specifically about installation. If every module needs a power source, do you have to punch a hole in the furnace wall for every module, or can you interlink them and only have one power source at the end of the chain?

Mark Rhoa: Good question. I didn’t do a good job describing that, but the modules will still go in just like a regular module. They actually have an extra set of ceramic tubes in them. When we do our design, we know where the elements are going to be hung.

If you have a 10-foot wall, you’re not going to have ten 1-foot pieces of element. You’re going to have an eight foot string of elements along that wall, and they will be hooked into the loops. One end of the hook will go on a loop, the other end will go on the ceramic tube that’s inside the module.

If you have a 12’ x 12’ high wall, and you may have a 10’ element in there, you’re probably only going to have four penetrations, maybe more. It’s not going to look like Swiss cheese. They’re going to be linked together.

These are all based on the number of zones in a furnace, too. Some super high aerospace applications are going to have everything super fine tuned just like it is with burners. If you think about how certain applications require way more precision and control over burners, the same thing can be true for these elements, too. The more precision and control you need, the more complicated it’s going to be just like it is with burners.

Before you hang the elements, you could look in that furnace and it would look just the same as a regular gas-fired furnace without the burners. Then you start hooking the elements on the walls. And the pictures of it are helpful.

If anyone has seen Home Alone, he goes into his basement and his furnace is shooting out all the flames. If you walk into a plant and can see that, getting that to seal will prevent heat from leaving.

Mark Rhoa

Furnace Doors (23:52)

Doug Glenn: When I think about ceramic fiber (which you don’t often see it inside a furnace if the door is closed), but a lot of times you’ll see it jammed in around the doors. To me it doesn’t look like that’s the way it’s supposed to be. So, doors are an issue, right? Can ceramics help with that?

Mark Rhoa: In heat treating furnaces, the temperatures aren’t totally crazy like forging furnaces where there’s a lot of shrinkage so they’re replacing it all the time. In heat treat, the temperature is lower. The main wear and tear items we see when we’re working on a repair with a client are around the doors because they’re getting the mechanical abuse of constantly changing. In some of the decarbonization talks I’ve attended and given at trade shows, we’re really looking at ways to save heat. Just making sure your door is sealed properly can do wonders.

If anyone has seen Home Alone, he goes into his basement and his furnace is shooting out all the flames. If you walk into a plant and can see that, getting that to seal will prevent heat from leaving.

You hear all these decarbonization talks, you see all these millions of dollars being thrown around, and, really, you can make a huge difference on a shoestring budget by simply making sure your door is sealing the way it’s supposed to seal.

If you can see the heat coming out, it’s like dollars flying out of your furnace on a game show. You’d have people lined up for that every day of the week.

So you hit the nail right on the head there. A really small, easy way to make a calculated decarbonization effort is making sure you have a door plan or you’re changing it.

It’s the same thing with tuning burners. Little tunes to a burner can save tons of gas and tons of CO2.

Figure 5. Heat leakage from doors needing maintenance

Doug Glenn: Making sure you’re maintaining good flame curtains on a continuous furnace, all that stuff just keeps the heat from coming out.

Did I see correctly that you guys do door repairs?

Mark Rhoa: We’ll do door repairs in our own shop. If someone ships a door to us, we’ll do the realigns there. About 20 years ago, we stopped having our outside contracting arm. Now we’re not doing any of the fieldwork. But we do realign doors in our shop.

Fiber is pretty easy to work with. Door perimeters are something that can easily be done by someone’s own maintenance crew. Maybe they’ll need one of our sales guys there making sure they do it right the first couple times. But it’s not a hard thing to do. If you have a 12 inch module perimeter, switch those 40 modules out once a year and you’ve got fresh gas savings.

Ceramic Maintenance (27:07)

Doug Glenn: Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about typical maintenance of ceramic-insulated furnace. What do we need to be careful about? Any tips you can offer?

Mark Rhoa: There’s another really affordable thing you can do. You can probably sometimes see this if you have a hot spot where paint’s chipping off or melting or if you have a temperature gun you can find those hot spots. If you see heat on the outside, then you’re typically going to see some sort of crack or gap on the inside. Make sure you have scheduled maintenance downtime with your furnace and stuff in any of those cracks.

If you’ve got a really big furnace or a continuous furnace, roller hearth, furnace type thing, the roll seals are some of the areas where you’re going to end up losing a lot of heat because there’s more wear and tear there. There’s just more opportunity for expansion and contraction.

We do have ceramic pumpable products. We call it liquid ceramic fiber for when there’s a hot spot on a furnace, it’s a big one, and you can’t get in there, you can drill a little hole on it, pump it in from the backside, and fill that up. You don’t want to start making your furnace Swiss cheese and poking holes.

It can be a quick stopgap. If you can’t get inside the furnace, fill it in from the backside, too. Because you don’t want those hot spots to grow and cause problems. You don’t want them to get to the hardware.

Then you may have a module where the hardware gets too hot in the backside and the module ends up falling in. That’s one scenario. You can get out ahead of it by filling some of those gaps.

For a refractory on the hearth, too, if you don’t want to replace a hearth you can find a refractory contractor to come in and (if you have a big furnace) spray gunite over the hearth to fix any gaps or cracks.

Doug Glenn: That’s more for castable, though?

Mark Rhoa: Yeah. On the fiber side of things, you’re looking for hot spots.

Doug Glenn: The takeaway is to make sure you’re taking regular thermal imaging of your shell of the furnace. If you’re noticing some hot spots, it’s time to investigate.

Mark Rhoa: If you have a lot of furnaces, you can get a thermal imaging gun for a couple hundred bucks and really [keep an eye out].

An even bigger deal are the doors. It will blow your mind if you look at the temperatures on a fresh door seal versus an old one. Have a temperature gun to justify to your bosses. “Hey, we realigned this, and it is 150°F. This time last year it was 250°F–350°F degrees.” Common sense can tell you we’re losing more heat when it’s like that.

Concerns with Free Floating Fiber (30:20)

Doug Glenn: Can you address the concern that some furnace users have regarding free floating fiber, especially in furnaces where there’s high velocity airflow?

Mark Rhoa: Talking about the benefits of fiber versus brick and castable, one of the benefits of the hard refractory is it does better with high velocities. Patriot furnaces may have a fan in there. Typically, they’re not getting high enough where we need to worry. You can put coatings on the fiber or rigid dyes or things like that to harden them.

But from a health and safety perspective, anytime you’re working with fiber you want to make sure you’re wearing a mask. They have warning labels on them. It’s not like it was back in the day. I’m not allowed to say the “a” word [asbestos]. So there are not worries like that anymore, either. But refractory ceramic fiber still does have a warning label on it.

We do have body size soluble fiber. Alkaline earth silica (AES), non RCF fiber, a bunch of fancy names, are more prevalent in Europe because of their rules. California’s got a lot of rules, too….

But we do supply that as well. It doesn’t have any sort of warning labels on it.

Obviously, when you’re working with it, you want to wear a mask because dust in general isn’t good. But it’s naturally soluble for your body.

It’s not quite as strong. It can have more shrinkage at lower temperatures. But it’s best to talk with somebody and understand what the right product is to use. Things can be a little worse, but there is a slight move in the direction of body soluble fiber because there are no warning labels on it. But it’s not drastic.

Some of the similar concerns foundries have is with sand and airborne silica now. Technically, I guess going to the beach we’d have airborne silica, too. There’s justification to taking those precautions, but it’s certainly not all doom and gloom.

The ceramic fiber is essentially little glass beads, like a tadpole head and then there’s a fiber tail that interlocks.

Mark Rhoa

Doug Glenn: What I heard wasn’t so much a human safety issue. It was the use of ceramic blankets inside of an aluminum annealing furnace: If the fibers got airborne, they would come to rest on the coils and mess up the strip going through. And then you have contaminated coil or it’s marked.

Mark Rhoa: The issue with that is the shot on the fibers. The ceramic fiber is essentially little glass beads, like a tadpole head and then there’s a fiber tail that interlocks.

Fiber has come a long way. The shot content is way lower than it used to be. But it’s certainly a concern if that gets on a coil and then it goes through the rolling mill and you make a small dent in all the glass … yeah.

A lot of different things can be done for that. People put up cladding; people rigidize it to lock the fiber in.

There are definitely concerns for all the applications. Big aluminum homogenizing furnaces may have that. Traditional, smaller batch annealing furnaces may not.

It would be the same thing if a little piece of brick chipped off onto [indiscernible]. The worry with some of the fiber stuff is it’s obviously a lot smaller so you don’t get to see it.

Doug Glenn: It’s a lot more conducive. You can imagine the difference between a brick being hit with high velocity air and a fiber, you would just see the degradation of the fiber. A fiber ceramic blanket would go down quicker.

Induction at Chiz (35:20)

I have one other question for you about Chiz. Your company was one of our sponsors at our recent Heat Treat Boot Camp, and I was surprised when you had an induction coil on your table. If you don’t mind, address what it is Chiz is doing in the induction area?

Mark Rhoa: We were using the company down the road from us, Advanced Materials Science (AMS), to machine some of our fiber boards and bricks that were a little too complicated for what we had in-house at the time. They have some really good CNC equipment up there. The guy who owned AMS was looking to sell off that branch of his business. We had been one of his bigger clients, and we came to an agreement to it; it’s still out of the same building, same equipment, same guys that are doing all the good work.

We started getting in there and saw a lot of the induction heating equipment on the client list — a lot of those electrical plastics, high temperature plastics, electrical marinite and transite boards, which we got into a little bit in the Chiz Brothers world but didn’t fully dive into it because the temperatures are a little bit lower than what we’re dealing with on the ceramic fiber side of things.

It’s been really good for us. They’ve got great machining capabilities down there to machine some of these complex parts out of NEMA G10 and marinite and transite and all these terms that were relatively new to me when we bought them.

It’s really helped us at some of these trade shows because three types of furnace guys walk by: the gas-fired guy, he’s my best friend; the induction guy used to be like, “There’s not that much we can do with you.” Now, we can do a lot with them.

And then I’m still trying to figure out how I can be happy when the vacuum furnace guy walks by. That will be a different battle for a different day. I’m not trying to get into the graphite felt world. I probably just can’t be friends with everybody.

But it’s been good to get into the induction industry. It’s something that we’ve been growing over the last year or two because we hadn’t been engaged with people quite as much as we had. 

Doug Glenn: Well, we’ll look for opportunities for you to be friends with the vacuum people. One thing I know from experience, Mark, you could be friends with anybody. I’m sure you can work it.

Mark Rhoa: I’ll try my best.

Doug Glenn: You’re doing good.

Thanks so much. I appreciate your time and appreciate you being here.

Mark Rhoa: Look forward to seeing you at the next event. For anyone watching, Heat Treat Boot Camp was great. Whether you’re a supplier or heat treater, it’s a good group of people bouncing ideas. It’s a crash course on a hundred different things in two days. I was there to sell stuff, but I learned stuff, too, which was an added bonus. I’d recommend it to anyone watching. It’s a good way to force yourself to get out of the office. I will definitely be back.

Attendees of the 2024 Heat Treat Boot Camp with the Heat Treat Today team
Heat Treat Boot Camp Completion Ceremony: (L to R) Doug Glenn, Mark Rhoa, Thomas Wingens

About The Guest

Mark Rhoa
Vice President
Chiz Bros
Eleanor Rhoa, daughter

In the heat treat industry, Mark handles Chiz Bros‘ relationships with various end-use customers as well as furnace manufacturers. Given the critical need for energy efficiency and uniform temperature throughout the heating process, Mark has been able to develop custom refractory and insulation solutions for customers to meet their complex needs. Through participation in the ASM’s Heat Treat Show, MTI’s Furnaces North America, Heat Treat Today’s Heat Treat Boot Camp, and IHEA’s Decarbonization SUMMIT, Mark has been supportive of the industry, but more importantly, has helped countless customers improve their thermal efficiency and profitability. Mark was recognized in Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 Class of 2021.

Contact Mark at mrhoajr@chizbros.com.

Search Heat Treat Equipment And Service Providers On Heat Treat Buyers Guide.Com

Heat Treat Radio #118: Saving Dollars with Ceramic Fiber Insulation Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #117: How GM Started & Grew FNC for Brake Rotors

/ AUTOMOTIVE HEAT TREAT TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, NITROCARBURIZING TECHNICAL CONTENT

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, host Doug Glenn converses with Mike Holly on his extensive experience in ferritic nitrocarburizing (FNC). Listen as they discuss Mike’s career at General Motors, where he implemented FNC to improve brake rotor performance. This episode delves into the technical aspects of FNC, its benefits such as enhanced wear and corrosion resistance, and its application beyond automotive, including military and industrial uses.

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

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:36)

Doug Glenn: Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio.

I have the great privilege today of talking with Mike Holly who I think you’re going to find very fascinating; I know I have in the conversations we’ve had so far. We’re primarily going to talk about ferritic nitrocarburizing (FNC) because Mike has some great experience in that area. But first I want to welcome you, Mike, and give you an opportunity to tell us a bit about you and your work history.

Mike Holly: I’m currently retired but I am working as an engineering consultant on my own, primarily in the areas of heat treatment, casting, welding, coding, and plating. I specialize in automotive and heavy truck applications. As far as my education, I’m a graduate metallurgical engineer with a bachelor’s from Wayne State University in Detroit and a master’s from Purdue. I have 43 years of experience in the auto and heavy truck industry; 32 of those years were with General Motors who I retired from. I was assigned to the materials engineering group in Warren, Michigan, and I specialized in driveline, exhaust, steering, chassis structures, and brake applications, primarily metal applications.

Mike Holly, lead consultant for Mike Holly Metals LLC, on ferritic nitrocarburizing

FNC and Brake Rotors (02:30)

Doug Glenn: The topic that we want to focus on today is FNC. Although if you think of anything else that might be of interest to our thermal processing people, feel free to deviate. How did you get introduced to ferritic nitrocarburizing or case hardening in general?

Mike Holly: I’ve always been involved with heat treatment and case hardening as a metallurgical engineer working on heavy gearing applications. I’m very familiar with FNC and way back in the mid-2000s (about 2005), we were looking at our warranty. In brakes, we saw an opportunity to improve the performance of our brake rotor by reducing brake judder, or pedal pulsation, which caused a lot of customer dissatisfaction. It caused a lot of warranties, knowing that these vehicles would be brought in to be serviced.

We were aware of FNC being done on brake rotors. It had been tried, but brake rotors are a highly dimensional, critical part, and control of distortion is paramount. With prior efforts, that distortion was completely out of control. And that’s why it never went anywhere. So, another team member and myself at GM took it offline and worked out the details so we could FNC-finish machined rotors with no subsequent grinding.

And we were able to do that, working with a company in Detroit at the time called Kolene. We were working in salt, but later on we did change the process to gas. The learnings between salt and gas pretty much transferred completely. We issued some patents, both for the FNC process itself and as it applies to brakes and some subsequent processing to improve the corrosion resistance of the rotor. My name is not on the patent as my prior employer owns the rights.

Doug Glenn: That is often the case, right? If you’re working for somebody, it’s their patent and not yours. How many patents were you involved with?

Mike Holly: I believe the number is 14 different patents. Some relate to the process directly; some relate to the interaction and the selection between the brake rotor and the friction material. There are quite a few patents that my prior employer has on this process. The first application was in 2009 in the Cadillac DTS and the Buick Lucerne. That’s where the rotors were first used.

Success with FNC (05:36)

Doug Glenn: Backing up to 2005, what do you think had made the FNC unsuccessful up to that point?

Mike Holly: Control of the output: The FNC process that was being used produced almost a solid white layer and we could not get the stopping power out of the friction material. This has to do with the application of something called a transfer layer. We discovered that you need porosity to get the transfer layer down.

Also, orientation of the brake rotor in the process is important; the patents tell you in the specs to orient the parts vertically.

Doug Glenn: Are you talking about the orientation of the rotor in the furnace?

Ferritic nitrocarburizing is a case hardening heat treatment. We are actually making a composite material. It’s within the families of nitriding, carbonitriding and carburizing. These are all done at different temperatures, and they produce different case depths. But again, you are making a composite material.

Mike Holly

Mike Holly: Yes. So it wasn’t anything we invented.

To try to control distortion further, we stress relieved the castings. We took all the residual stresses out from the founding, or the casting, of the part prior to machining, and then put the parts through ferritic nitrocarburizing, fully machined, no other grinding necessary; doing so, we’re able to maintain the critical dimensions.

A brake rotor is a safety critical part, so there are a lot of steps and validations to get that implemented.

Doug Glenn: It sounds like before 2005, and correct me if I’m wrong on this one, Mike, they were FNCing unfinished parts? They were FNCing the rotors before they were machined?

Mike Holly: No, they were doing finished parts and discovered that the dimensions, but the lateral runout and the thickness were so out of control that they would have to go in and subsequently grind to get it back in the dimension. But the FNC case depth is only 10 to 20 microns. You may wind up just grinding the case right off!

What Is FNC? (08:38)

Finish machining FNCed parts really can’t be done without removing the FNC, and then you lose the benefit. It’s a difficult matter to heat treat finished machined parts. It is done. But it was control of dimensions that made the difference.

Doug Glenn: Let’s take a step back then. I want to talk some very basics. You can give us a little metallurgy lesson for people who might not know what FNC is. Can you tell us about what we are doing in this process?

Mike Holly: Ferritic nitrocarburizing is a case hardening heat treatment. We are actually making a composite material. It’s within the families of nitriding, carbonitriding and carburizing. These are all done at different temperatures, and they produce different case depths. But again, you are making a composite material.

FNC is a thermal chemical treatment. We diffuse carbon and nitrogen into the surface of the iron. This strengthens the iron and provides not only a wear-resistant case but corrosion resistance. That’s a peculiar advantage to FNC.

We can specify for steels, stainless steels, gray irons, nodular irons, a whole host of ferrous materials. FNC can be performed in a gaseous atmosphere, molten salt or even a fluidized bed. You involve two gases: a source of carbon, which could be carbon dioxide or natural gas, and a source of nitrogen, which is typically ammonia.

The process is done subcritical, which means below the critical temperature of like 723°C (1333°F) — it’s well below that. It’s performed at around 560°C to say 590°C (1040°F to 1090°F). It produces a very hard wear and corrosion-resistant case from 10 to 20 microns and thickness.

Screenshot from the ECM USA advertisement (embedded in the podcast video) highlighting the ferritic nitrocarburizing processing they provide

Benefits of FNC (10:35)

So, what are the benefits? Why would we even do this? For one thing, it’s done at such a low temperature that it’s a low distortion heat treatment; we’re not going through the transformation temperature.

Doug Glenn: For example, just for those who don’t know, like carburizing — that means going above critical.

Mike Holly: That’s right. With FNC, we get an improved fatigue durability due to the higher surface strength. Ferritic nitrocarburized parts have a compressive residual stress on the surface, and that’s beneficial for fatigue. It’s resistant to adhesive and abrasive wear, it provides a fairly good surface finish, and, very importantly, it improves corrosion resistance compared to other processes.

And a critical environmental concern is there’s no hazardous waste treatment or landfill involved. These gases are readily available. There’s really no waste treatment that we have to concern ourselves with.

Why don’t we do every gear this way? It has to do with the case depth; these are very shallow cases. For heavily loaded parts like ring and pinion high point gearing, we need a thicker case to resist the rolling contact fatigue.

In that application we have to go to carburizing or carbonitriding. And for some shafts where we get very high bending stress, we have to use induction hardening, which is a case hardening treatment that doesn’t use diffusion. You’re just modifying the microstructure of the surface.

FNC has a unique niche: It’s subcritical, has good wear and corrosion resistance, and it improves the fatigue properties.

Doug Glenn: I want to ask you about other applications for FNC besides brake rotors.

First, let me ask you this since you’re talking about the shallow case depth. I’m thinking to myself, you’ve got the rotor and you’ve got your friction product (which we would consider to be the pads that are mounted to the caliper, let’s say on a car). Are those pads not also kind of grinding off the shallow case depth of the rotors?

Mike Holly: It could if you had an aggressive enough friction material. In one of the designs that we had to make was selection of friction materials. And at the time the non-asbestos organic friction materials worked very well with FNC.

But as we go up in aggressiveness, one of the projects I’m working on is improving the case wear resistance of the FNC brake rotors. We’re doing that by alloying gray iron with niobium. We alloy with niobium and form niobium carbides in the case. This greatly improves the wear resistance on the iron side. So that’s how we’re addressing the more aggressive friction materials that would typically be used in Europe.

Applications of FNC (14:51)

Doug Glenn: I want to come back to that niobium, too, so we’ll probably hit on that again. What other applications of FNC have you seen?

Mike Holly: It’s used where wear distortion and corrosion resistance are very important. Many lightly loaded gears will fit into this category. Struts, the devices that hold up your hoods, they’ll be FNC. Some locking mechanisms are FNC. Brake backing plates are currently done. And I think one of the biggest applications is clutch pack discs, which are small 1040, 1050 steel materials (that may not be the only alloy that’s used). They’re FNCed to improve the wear resistance in the case.

Why don’t we do every gear this way? It has to do with the case depth; these are very shallow cases. For heavily loaded parts like ring and pinion high point gearing, we need a thicker case to resist the rolling contact fatigue.

Mike Holly

An upcoming application I’m working on is chassis cradles and frames. We stamp these pieces out of steel, and we weld them. But when we weld them, the weld heat affected zones can lose strength. What we’ve come up with is by using a niobium alloy, a high strength, low alloy steel, and FNC heat treating it, all the weld heat affected zones have good fatigue performance, along with the rest above the cradle. That’s something I worked on at GM, and there’s a patent on that. 

And brake rotors are the latest application which has benefited from FNC treatment. They provide very long-term durability, reduce brake judder, and they’re very commonly used for electric vehicles. Because of the regenerative cycle, there is not a lot of friction application. We have to be very concerned about corrosion buildup on an electric vehicle application.

Doug Glenn: When you start mentioning about car frames and things of that sort, have you gotten at all involved with this giga cast thing for Tesla? I mean is there any FNC going on there?

Mike Holly: Well, I’m not sure what Tesla is doing, but with chassis structures, you’re not only balancing strength. Strength is important; you’re also balancing stiffness. Stiffness could be related to the metal. Now steel has very high Young’s modulus value compared to aluminum. The way you have to make that up with aluminum is through section properties: Thickness and shape.

There’s always competition between steel and non-ferrous materials, whether it be cast aluminum or fabricated aluminum and steel. They each have their advantages, and there have been many vehicles made with both types of construction. Where stiffness is critical, typically steel dominates. That’s the story of chassis structures.

Doug Glenn: When we spoke before, I think you mentioned that there are some non-automotive applications for FNC like golf clubs and some other things?

Mike Holly: I have seen it performed at a company in Michigan where they’re doing, for example, very large gates that are used for hydroelectric plants. They’re FNCing the gate to improve its erosion resistance from water. It’s done in many military applications for devices that would hold onto ordinance. It can be used on stainless steels to improve their wear and strength. There are non-automotive applications for sure.

If you attend the Shot Show this month, January 2025, you’ll know that a lot of firearms are known to need FNC treatment. Learn more at https://shotshow.org/

FNC at General Motors (19:52)

Doug Glenn: I want to ask you a question about the business side of FNC. A lot of times there’s a lot of inertia to keep things the way they are, right? A lot of our advertisers have trouble breaking in with new technologies. From your perspective as one of the lead guys on this for GM, what did it take to get the FNC process into your production schedule?

Mike Holly: First, we had to prove that this is something that would benefit the client. The client would benefit twofold: The vehicles would resist distortion and corrosion; that would improve the performance of the brake in terms of resisting pedal pulsation.

Also, warranties can be very costly. Adding this type of enhancement reduces warranty costs. But you do have to balance the cost reduction of warranty versus the cost of the process. Initially it was very costly, but we wanted to see how it would perform in real time. And at game speed, which means in the customer’s hands.

There was a very willing group at GM, the Cadillac people, who wanted to be first. And they were willing to do this. It turned out quite well. And since that time, it’s been adopted by many car platforms including many competitors.

General Motors, the first to use FNC processed rotors on their pickup trucks and big SUVs, with Ford not far behind; in this Heat Treat Today article from April 2023, Michael Mouilleseaux reflects on the very commercial Mike Holly references in his interview: “I was shocked the first time I saw the commercial: a Silverado pickup truck, out in the snow, and the speaker saying, ‘We now have an 80,000-mile brake system because of a heat treating process called FNC!'” Read more at: https://www.heattreattoday.com/featured-news/how-tip-ups-forever-transformed-brake-rotor-manufacturing/

Doug Glenn: Do you have any idea what it was about the guys in the Cadillac DTS division that made it more attractive, more palatable to them than others?

Mike Holly: They wanted to be first. They wanted to offer a premium vehicle with premium performance. They advertised it in their brochures.

When it was adopted by the truck platforms, which was a really big deal in terms of volume, it was actually advertised on one of the Super Bowls early on. I still have that.

Doug Glenn: That would be very interesting to see a Super Bowl ad talking about brake rotors.

Mike Holly: Brakes and FNC. You know, the customer is king, and you have to provide something that they’re willing to go along with. Ultimately, we have to make money. Those were key characteristics.

Starting Out with FNC (23:26)

Doug Glenn: At that point did you just jump in full bore — buy the equipment and do it yourself? Or did you first start by doing some outsourcing of it?

Mike Holly: It was originally done in the existing supply base. We used existing heat treaters. The furnaces were not optimized for brake rotors; parts were being shipped a lot.

Before we started purchasing equipment, we wanted to make sure this was going to operate in real time at game speed as we expected. As the platforms were added, it was very clear from the beginning (and we know this from highly machined gearing) that the best thing is to have the heat treat shop right in the manufacturing facility. That way you’re not shipping these very dimensionally critical parts all over the place. And the dunnage is expensive.

Today the FNC operations are co-located for the most part with the machining plant. And in many cases, you’ll see the foundry, the machining plant and FNC all in the same locale. This eliminates shipping and transferring costs, maintaining your highly machined parts and eliminating the handling. These are heavy parts, and the furnaces have to be designed to accept the thermodynamic load of large parts. And it’s preferred to do it by the ton — a lot of parts at once. And these are batch processes, so they’re very receptive to that.

Part Fixturing (25:23)

Doug Glenn: Earlier you mentioned the criticalness of fixturing. Is there anything more you can say about that? We don’t want to disclose any secrets.

Mike Holly: Generally, our patents will just say vertical orientation. The heat treat suppliers all have different furnaces, so that’s for them. They design their own racking, and that’s their property. They don’t have to disclose that.

The OEMs just require dimensional control. So, show us statistically that your lateral runout, your thickness and your wheel mount surface meet our specs. And, of course, the guidance that the parts should be oriented vertically and should be stress relieved before machining is out there.

As far as the intimate details of the rack and how heavily loaded the furnace is, that’s all their efficiencies, and they own that. I don’t reveal that to anybody. That’s theirs. It’s not for me to cross fertilize the industry with that.

Early Players in FNC (26:49)

Doug Glenn: For posterity’s sake, it would be nice to know who some of the early players were in this. Obviously, your DTS Cadillac division were kind of the end users. But who were the people outside of GM who helped out?

Mike Holly: I’ll give some credit here: I mentioned Kolene. I think they’re out of the salt bath business now. The original salt bath heat treater was KC Jones in Hazel Park, Michigan, and then the gas processing was basically first implemented at Woodworth in Detroit.

Doug Glenn: I’m familiar with them, and I think they’re still doing it, right? From what I understand, Woodworth’s got a huge business in that.

Mike Holly: They are still doing it. They’re a very dominant player, but other players have entered the market and been very successful. It can be done. And from the OEMs perspective, competition is great.

I was involved in developing processors not only in North America, but in Asia and South America.

Doug Glenn: Were there are a lot of hoops to jump through for the folks at Woodworth or Kolene, for example? Do you have any tips or suggestions for companies who are wanting to supply stuff like that to GM?

Mike Holly: Initially there were a lot of lessons learned. We were able to work through that — mainly to get the scrap rate down. Now it’s down to very low levels. There’s continual learnings like stress relief, for example. It’s since been discovered that not all brake rotors need to be stress relieved. Depending on the geometry of the rotor, they may not develop a lot of residual stresses in the casting operation. Or the casting operations could be different if you have, say, a vertical part line with very long shakeout, the cooling rate is rather slow. We’ll develop minimal residual stresses that you may not have to stress relief. But at the end of the day, the dimensions must be met, and 100% of these parts are typically checked for dimensions.

The latest change occurring that’s driving new ideas is the Euro 7 regulation, the dust emission.

Mike Holly

FNC and New Technologies (29:39)

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump back to the process a little bit. This may have to do with some technology moving forward. But is there any alternative to FNC at this point? Any competitive processes?

Mike Holly: The latest change occurring that’s driving new ideas is the Euro 7 regulation, the dust emission. And I can describe that if you’re interested in a very short description.

They’re basically new rules from the European Commission. They’re intended to provide cleaner vehicles in terms of emissions and air quality. The latest implementation date appears to be 2026. They have a rollout date of when you have to meet the requirements. And it is particularly focused on brakes and tire-related emissions.

This is according to the SAE; I’ll give them credit where credit is due. They basically tell us that with Euro 7, brake particle emissions (size in the PM10 range; inhalable particulate around ten microns and smaller like dust and pollen and 2.5 microns) must reduce by 25% to 30% to a maximum of, say, seven milligrams per kilometer. 

It’s a very complicated regulation. I think the latest data I’ve seen is 20, 35, but even if it’s 2035, we have to start working on that today.

The two technologies that I think are going to come to the forefront is going to be FNC and laser cladding, which you may have seen coming out of Europe. In laser cladding, we’re going to clad the brake rotor, the thermal spraying type of application with a very hard wear-resistant layer of titanium carbide. That will require post-grinding.

What I’m working on is FNC and enhancing the case properties by alloying the iron with niobium. Now, is this an entirely new idea? I don’t think so. Most metallurgists will tell you that even in carbides and grades we use different steels to improve either the case or core properties. Alloying additions are well-known in the heat treat industry. I’m boosting the hardness of the FNC case with niobium carbides. It also benefits the core by improving the strength of the core.

I think those are the two technologies involved.

I think niobium plus FNC is certainly the low-cost approach. Will it be compatible with all friction materials? In the most aggressive friction materials out there, you might have to go to laser cladding. But I think for the majority of friction materials, FNC on its own or FNC plus niobium will work, and they’re very low-cost type additions. Niobium alloying with cast iron is very well-known, and it’s been done in the past. It doesn’t require a lot of capital investment. If you already have FNC-heat treated rotors, you don’t have to buy furnaces. In my opinion, it is the low-cost option to accomplish the objective of meeting Euro 7.

Doug Glenn: I want to go back to that process of niobium a little bit just to be clear. The niobium is alloyed into the rotor to start with, right?

Mike Holly: That’s correct.

Doug Glenn and Mike Holly discussing laser cladding, grinding, and carbides in FNC

Doug Glenn: You’re not infusing it with….?

Mike Holly: No.

Doug Glenn: Ok, you’ve got the niobium and the carbides in the rotor to start with, and you’re just FNCing it as usual.

Mike Holly: It’s an alloy furnace addition at the foundry. It has been done in either electric or cupola melting. There is a heavy truck rotor application that was niobium alloyed for many years, and that was advertised as a 1 million-mile rotor. It had a very high niobium addition, so it affected the machinability of the part.

In the heavy truck industry, it’s all about uptime — keeping the trucks out of the shop and on the road. It accomplished the client’s objective.

Doug Glenn: You mentioned advertising again. I’ve got to go back and find this DTS advertisement on the Super Bowl.

Mike Holly: I think it was a truck application, Silverado Sierra.

Doug Glenn: I’ve got to find that.

The cladding process, if we’re talking about which one of these processes might win out if there was competition between them, is the cladding process done piece by piece? How do they clad a rotor? In FNC you’re not doing it piece by piece.

Mike Holly: One at a time.

Doug Glenn: Do you think the cost element will be the deal-breaker there, besides the fact that you’re adding cladding and post-grinding?

Carbides that could be used in ferritic carburizing: niobium, titanium and tungsten

Mike Holly: Yes, those are very costly. But the most costly part of it is the materials. You have to put an adhesion layer down, that’s basically a 316-type stainless steel all done with laser type thermal spray application and then a second layer of the carbide.

There are a couple carbides that could be used; titanium carbide is the favorite now. Niobium carbide could be used. Tungsten carbide can be used, but that has some environmental effects; I think tungsten has fallen out of favor. 316 contains both nickel chromium and molybdenum. Nickel is traded on the London Metal Exchange. Your ability to control costs with nickel is minimal. Nickel and molybdenum, especially, is used in other applications such as high temperature alloys. So, you’re going to get competition from the turbine engine material.

In the case of FNC, ammonia, natural gas, carbon dioxide, and propane are all readily available worldwide. They are not controlled by any LME (London Metal Exchange) or anything like that.

Also, once you grind the surface, you have to deal with the grinding swarf. You cannot just put nickel to drain; that has to be treated. And, of course, you would like to recover it.

But I don’t want to throw the laser cladding people completely under the bus; it produces a very hard, wear-resistant layer.

Doug Glenn: It sounds like there may be applications where the cladding makes sense, but for your everyday truck and car you probably don’t need that high end rotor.

Mike Holly: I think we have to get back to basics. What does the brake do? It’s an energy conversion device. It’s converting mechanical energy to heat, or in the case of regenerative braking, it’s charging a battery. There’s the brake rotor, the metallic surface and the friction material. It has to be looked at as a system. What are the performance objectives that we intend to meet? And what is the desired durability and cost?

Doug Glenn: It seems like from what you’re describing FNC would have a huge cost advantage.

Mike Holly: I think so.

Current State of Brake Rotor Industry (39:05)

Doug Glenn: In your consulting work which you mentioned earlier, you’re working on improving the wear life of these rotors using FNC by incorporation of niobium?

Mike Holly: Yes. I published an SAE paper recently, and I’m going to publish another one in the upcoming North American colloquium and also in EuroBrake. My clients are sponsoring various tests and evaluations both here, in Europe and in South America. We’re getting a lot of good data, but competition makes us better. It truly does. You see it at these brake meetings. There’s always the cladding people, and there’s always the FNC people.

Doug Glenn: What is the leading brake event in the United States?

Mike Holly: In my opinion, it would be the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Brake Colloquium. But there’s also the regular SAE congress. In Europe, it would be EuroBrake. And I think there’s comparable activities in Asia.

Doug Glenn: I just thought of a question I wanted to ask you before: You said Euro 7 is for brakes and tires, and they’re concerned about the particles created by both when they’re used — tire wear on the roads or brake friction?

Mike Holly: Yes. And they’re concerned about the microplastics from the tire. I think the tire people have a bigger job than the brake people do. But brakes are a fairly significant challenge.

Doug Glenn: I’m laughing because I’m thinking it depends how you drive. Some people are a little heavier on the brakes than others. 

Are you fairly confident that Euro 7 will come to the U.S. at some point?

Mike Holly: I’m not a regulations expert, but I think it likely will. It’s more of a political question. I understand from talking to some contacts in Asia that they plan on adopting it. We’ll see; it’s definitely going to add cost.

Doug Glenn: Yes, most regulations do.

Final Thoughts (42:18)

Doug Glenn: Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap up?

Mike Holly: I not only work on brakes; I’ve also worked in suspension springs. Some of those are microalloyed to improve their properties. I can do CQI-9 audits. I’ve worked on coatings and platings (hard chrome or electroless nickel). If someone would need an extra hand, I get to help out.

Doug Glenn: You’ve got my vote. When did you retire from GM?

Mike Holly: I retired in 2021, and I currently live near Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Doug Glenn: And you’ve built your own consultancy, which is great. Thanks for taking the time to visit with us. I appreciate your expertise.

Mike Holly: Thank you.

About The Guest

Mike Holly
Consultant
Mike Holly Metals LLC

Mike is currently a consultant with Mike Holly Metals LLC, specializing in heat treatment, coating, casting, metal forming and joining operations. He has 42 years of experience in industry, including 32 years at the General Motors Materials Engineering department where he was assigned to support automotive and truck chassis applications. He holds 15 patents and was key in the development of Ferritic Nitrocarburizing Brake Rotors. Mike has a Bachelor of Science in Metallurgical Engineering from Wayne State University and a Masters from Purdue University.

Contact Mike at mike.holly72@att.net.

Search Heat Treat Equipment And Service Providers On Heat Treat Buyers Guide.Com

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The Holiday Edition of This Week in Heat Treat Social Media

/ MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT NEWS

Welcome to the first installment of Heat Treat Today’s This Week in Heat Treat Social Media of 2025, and today we are focusing on holiday-themed social media posts. From handing out Christmas cheer to learning opportunities shared over the holiday break, check out these posts and videos for a roundup of festal heat treat social media: We start with alternatives to New Year’s resolutions.

As you know, there is so much content available on the web that it’s next to impossible to sift through all of the articles and posts that flood our inboxes and notifications on a daily basis. So, Heat Treat Today is here to bring you the latest in compelling, inspiring, and entertaining heat treat news from the different social media venues that you’ve just got to see and read! If you have content that everyone has to see, please send the link to editor@heattreattoday.com.

1. Not Into Resolutions? Here Are Some Alternatives

Leave it to young leaders in the heat treat industry to think of new ways to approach a new year. What’s your innovative alternative to resolutions?

Look these posts up on LinkedIn here: Kalen Fitch at Gasbarre; Sarah Jordan; Tim Mohr.

2. Heat Treaters Changing Lives

Something about the folks in this industry: they just love to reach out and help others.

Look these posts up on LinkedIn here: Wirco and Solar Atmospheres

3. We Don’t Stop Learning Just Because It’s a Holiday Break

Between important family time, seasonal activities, and festal joy, some of your industry colleagues were uploading opportunities for you to expand your knowledge about heat treating and all things related.

Look these posts up on LinkedIn here: Anhui Qasim Grinding Ball Group Co.,Ltd; Nonthaphat Sinprasong; and Light Metal Age.

4. Watch & Listen

Did you see or hear any of these videos or podcasts from 2024?

Check out Carlos Torres (2019 40 Under 40 alumni) hosting the Heat Treat Podcast on YouTube; Advanced Heat Treat Corp‘s post on LinkedIn; and the Heat Treat Radio page here.

5. Brain Fun To Launch the New Year

Sweep out that holiday fog! It’s time for some gymnastics for the brain!

Look these posts up on LinkedIn here: Metallurgical Engineering; Srini Vanapalli (the question); Srini Vanapalli (the solution); and Metallurgical Engineering.

Find Heat Treating Products and Services When You Search on Heat Treat Buyers Guide.com

The Holiday Edition of This Week in Heat Treat Social Media Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #116: Basic Practices for Successful Leak Detection

/ HEAT TREAT RADIO, Manufacturing Heat Treat Technical Content, VACUUM PUMPS GAUGES VALVES TECHNICAL CONTENT

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, Dave Deiwert, a seasoned expert in leak detection, shares key steps to locate leaks in a vacuum furnace. Host Doug Glenn and his guest specifically look at helium as a tracer gas. From Dave’s extensive experience starting as a field service engineer to founding his own company, Tracer Gas Technologies, listen as he identifies systematic approaches, the influence of air currents, and cost-effective strategies for effective leak detection.

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

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Meet Dave Deiwert (01:10)

Doug Glenn: Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio. We’re talking today about leak detection in vacuum, and we’re happy to have Dave Deiwert with us who is a leak detection expert.

Dave, would you give our listeners a little bit of background about you and your qualifications in the industry, and then we’ll jump into some questions about leak detection?

Dave Deiwert: I’ve been in leak detection since 1989. I started off my career as a field service engineer. I did that for about 10 years, then moved into sales engineering for probably the second third of my career. And for the last number of years, I’ve been a product manager and applications manager, working with several of the major vacuum and leak detection companies in the world. I thoroughly enjoy what I do and helping others with their leak testing applications.

Doug Glenn: And now you’ve got your own company. Could we hear a bit about that?

Dave Deiwert: Sure, Tracer Gas Technologies had its birth in September of this year. My focus will be on providing training and applications assistance to industrial clients, research and development labs, and government and university labs.

Doug Glenn: What’s the best way for people to reach you?

Doug Glenn and Dave Deiwert discuss his new position as president of Tracer Gas Technologies.

Dave Deiwert: We are new and still working on the website, but in the meantime, you can reach me at my phone at (765) 685-3360 or email me at DDeiwert@gmail.com.

Doug Glenn: Dave recently published an article in the November 2024 print issue of Heat Treat Today called, “Basics of Vacuum Furnace Leak Detection, Part One.” The article includes ten tips for vacuum leak detection using a helium leak detector.

Indicators of Leaks (03:45)

We’re going to cover some of those tips today. But before we get started, what are the most common symptoms that we have a leak when operating a vacuum furnace?

Dave Deiwert: I’ve been helping these clients for a number of years. And typically, one or two things happen: So, the client is following the furnace manufacturer’s recommendations to do a periodic “leak up test,” where they pump the furnace down towards base vacuum; they isolate the pumps to look for the pressure to rise after the pump’s been isolated, and if the pressure rises at a faster rate over a test period of time, which might be ten minutes, then they determine they have a leak that they should be looking for.

It’s either during that test that they discover they have a leak that they should be looking for before it impacts quality. Or the problem develops while they’re using the furnace, and it begins to affect the quality of the product. They start to see a difference in the appearance of the product because there’s some type of contaminant gas from atmosphere, water vapor, or maybe their product is sensitive to oxygen and such. It also could be as simple as they used to pump down to base pressure for the process in “x” amount of time, and it seems like it’s taking longer.

One of those two things will get their attention, and that’s okay. Let’s look for the leaks.

Isolating the Source of the Leak (05:11)

Doug Glenn: Most of the discussion we’re going to have today is going to be on using helium leak detectors. But let’s assume you don’t have a helium leak detector. What would be your checklist of things to run through to try to isolate the source of the leak?

Dave Deiwert: My perception is that end users that only have maybe one or two furnaces might not have their own leak detector, and calling for help might be quite a pricey option. They may try to do some things on their own without the leak detector or help from somebody outside the organization.

The first thing you’re going to do is consider where most leaks typically would be on a furnace. You’re going to think of things like the door is opened and closed on every cycle of the furnace, so the gasket or O-ring type material there can get worn over time.

Or maybe while the door was open, something came to rest on the O-ring: a piece of fuzz, hair, or slag metal. Something may be there that creates a leak path when they close the door. To look at that in greater detail, they get some extra light on it and see if they can determine something there. They may go ahead and remove that O-ring and just clean it up really well. Many might put a light coating with some vacuum grease or some type on it and then reinstall it.

Of course, we recommend that you try not to use vacuum grease. That could be a whole other discussion. But many will try that and see if it’s helpful to them.

The vent valve for the system also opens up after every test. So, there’s another gasket that can get worn or dirty.

Another thing would be process gases. If they filled their furnace with some back stream with argon or something, those process gas valves can leak past the seal.

So they think about each of these things and go through them one at a time and inspect them. And if they’re not quite sure what they’re seeing, they might replace the gasket or seal and then hope that they’re successful. And if they continue to not be successful, they ultimately end up calling for help.

Somebody could get very frustrated looking for leaks if you don’t know for sure that it’s only picking up helium. It’s not reacting to Dave Deiwert’s aftershave or cologne, or something else… the fork truck that went by, or something else. I can say with 100% certainty it’s reacting to helium.

Understanding Leak Detector Technology (07:14)

Doug Glenn: I want to ask for a further explanation on the first tip in this article.You say, “Understand how your leak detector works to the point that you can confirm it is working properly.” How does a company do that?

Dave Deiwert: If you’re going to go to the expense of having a leak detector — which many should — they should understand how it works properly and how to tell that it’s working properly or not before you start spraying helium to look for leaks.

Every manufacturer of leak detectors today, and for quite a number of years, has a leak detector that will let you know whether you’re in the test mode or in a standby mode. If you ever approach somebody that is leak testing and the leak detector is in standby mode and they’re spraying helium, you can suggest, “I bet you haven’t found any leaks yet, have you? Well then, you might want to put your leak detector in test mode.”

Understanding it’s in test mode and understanding how to calibrate the leak detector are good tools to help your success in finding leaks on the system. You have to at least be familiar enough with the leak detector to understand its operation and knowing that it’s sensitive to helium and the calibrating procedure increases and supports this understanding.

Doug Glenn: That makes a lot of sense: Make sure it’s turned on.

Dave Deiwert: Right, turned on and connected to your system. If you don’t have a hose going from the leak detector to the furnace and you’re spraying helium, that’s also going to be a problem.This might sound silly, but sometimes people think, “Hey, this sounds easy. You just spray helium and look for leaks.” They may ask some person who doesn’t really have much experience, “Hey, go over and test the furnace.” They may be embarrassed to say that they don’t know how to use the leak detector, so they may give it a go. Because they don’t understand the leak detector, they might not be successful.

Doug Glenn: That leads me to my next question because I would be that guy that doesn’t really know how they work. When you’re performing a leak detection using a helium leak detector, how does that process work? Where is the leak detector? Where are you spraying the helium?

Dave Deiwert: Sure. In my career I’ve seen people choose a few different points of connection to the furnace, but you’ll find our industry that we teach people that the best place would be to connect the hose from the leak detector to point in front of the blower if they’ve got a blower on their system. If they don’t have one, it’s going to go at a connection point near the inlet of the pump of gas pumping through this system. But you want to sample that flow of gases from the furnace towards the pumps. That way, you can get a sample to the leak detector as you’re spraying the helium.

When you talk about how the leak detectors work… at every class I teach, I think it’s important to at least give enough information so that you have confidence that the leak detector can help you. How’s it sensitive to helium and why? With these leak detectors, no matter who manufactures them, typically you’ll see that inside there’s a mass spectrometer that’s tuned to the gas mass weight of a helium molecule. And because it’s dependent on the mass weight of a helium molecule, not the mass weight of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, or whatever, you can be 100% sure that when the leak detector reacts, it’s getting helium from somewhere.

I stress that because somebody could get very frustrated looking for leaks if you don’t know for sure that it’s only picking up helium. It’s not reacting to Dave Deiwert’s aftershave or cologne, or something else… the fork truck that went by, or something else. I can say with 100% certainty it’s reacting to helium.

You might be surprised how often in my career somebody said, “Dave, the leak detector’s reacting, and I haven’t even started spraying helium yet.” I will tell them helium is coming from somewhere, and it could be the tank of helium that you’ve rolled up to the furnace is spraying helium and you didn’t realize it. Maybe the spray gun is still spraying helium even though the trigger is not pulled. Maybe the regulator’s leaking.

Leak detector hooked up to vacuum furnace
Source: Dave Deiwert

And if that furnace has got a leak, it’s the whole reason you brought the leak detector over. You’re not spraying helium yet, but helium is being sprayed by the tank or the regulator. The leak detector is going to react to the helium regardless of how it got into the system. So that can be very frustrating.

Let me back up: If you know beyond the shadow of a doubt the leak detector will only respond to helium and you haven’t sprayed helium yet, you know immediately it’s coming from somewhere.That is to say, I need to figure out what’s going on there. Otherwise I might spin my wheels looking for a leak while something else is a distraction for me.

Does that make sense?

Understanding Helium (11:53)

Doug Glenn: Yes, it does. Let me ask you this, though, because I’ve never done a helium leak detection as a publisher of a magazine — we don’t have a lot of helium in this business. You’ve got this box called the helium leak detector. It’s got a hose. You connect the hose near the blower or someplace close to the vacuum pump. I assume the leak detector is sampling the air as it’s coming towards the pump or towards the blower. Correct?

Dave Deiwert: Absolutely.

Doug Glenn: Then you’re spraying helium on the outside of the furnace somewhere to see if it’s being pulled into the furnace through some hole and therefore heading towards the pump.  Correct?

Dave Deiwert: Yes.

Doug Glenn: I wasn’t ever sure how that worked — whether you spray the helium inside the furnace then you’re checking around the outside of the furnace with the leak detector; I know that sounds silly, but I thought that might be how it worked. But the truth is you’re sampling the air inside, and you’re spraying helium on the outside. If that’s the case, with a canister of helium on the outside of the furnace, won’t the detector be detecting the gas because it is going from that helium canister through and into the furnace, right?

Dave Deiwert: Yes, that’s correct.

When we get into the idea of spraying helium — where does the helium go when I spray it? When I started my career way back in 1989 as a field service engineer, I was taught that helium rises because it’s the lightest gas. And so I was taught, as were many other people, to start at the top of the furnace and work your way down.

The problem with teaching that is (remember, there’s five parts per million of helium naturally in the air we breathe) that if I start spraying helium, I can tell you with 100% confidence that the air currents in the room are going to impact that helium. If you can feel the air blowing from your right towards your left, and when someone’s got a floor fan on you can be sure of it, the predominant helium you’re spraying is going to move that way. It’s going to dissipate over time, but starting somewhere methodical to spray the helium is important and to not spray too much.

Be Patient with Leak Detection! (13:14)

Doug Glenn: I did want to ask a little bit about that because in your second and third tip in this article you expressed the need to be patient when doing a leak detection. Just exactly how patient do we need to be, and why do we need to be so patient?

Dave Deiwert: Frequently throughout my career, I’ve run into people who say, “I’m not sure if I’ve got a leak, so I’m going to spray a lot of helium so I can determine it pretty quickly.” But if you spray that helium like you’re trying to dust off the equipment, you will have so much helium in the air the leak detector will definitely react if there’s a leak. However, now you have to wait forever and a day; it could be quite a while until the helium that you just sprayed all over the system and in the room dissipates before you can continue looking for a leak.

I always ask this question when I’m teaching a class with people who have been doing leak testing: “How do you set your helium spray nozzle?” The ones that’ve been doing it for quite a while will say that they’ll get a glass of water, for example, and they’ll put the spray nozzle down in the water and adjust the flow to where they get one bubble every two to three seconds. I see some variation on that, one to ten seconds. But they’ll try to meter it down. Somebody might say, “I’ll put the nozzle up to my lip and spray so I can barely feel it.”

I’ve run into people who say, “I’m not sure if I’ve got a leak, so I’m going to spray a lot of helium so I can determine it pretty quickly.” But if you spray that helium like you’re trying to dust off the equipment, you will have so much helium in the air the leak detector will definitely react if there’s a leak. However, now you have to wait forever and a day.

To those people, I’ll say, “That’s a good start. If you put that nozzle in that glass of water and it looks like a Ken and Barbie jacuzzi, you’re spending way too much helium into that.” I would meter that down to a very small amount, whether it’s a bubble every three seconds or you can barely feel it on your lip is a good place to start.

And because I made the comment that helium doesn’t necessarily rise but can go different directions based on the wind, air currents in the room, and fresh air makeup, eventually somebody says, “Where should I start?” I’ll say, “I don’t have a problem with you starting at the top of the furnace and working your way down. Be methodical.”

Some people will start at the leak detector they just hooked up because they might have put a leak in the bellows connection from the leak detector. You might start there to make sure the assembly you just did is leak tight.

But start somewhere, be methodical as you move across the system, and remember that helium can go up, down, left, back, or forward depending on what the air currents are.

Doug Glenn: I was actually going to ask you about the air currents, because I thought that was an interesting tip that you had made. In fact, I think that’s like tip four and five in this article. I think we’re dealing with air currents and things of that sort. So, we’ll skip over that, because I think you’veaddressed that.

The Dead Stick Method (16:48)

Doug Glenn: You mention an interesting thing called a “dead stick method” in tip number six. Can you explain what that is?

Dave Deiwert: I’m glad you asked that because I looked back on that later and thought I don’t think I elaborated on that enough for somebody that’s never done the dead stick method. That is a term for when you spray just a little squirt of helium away from you and the furnace, and then stop spraying. Then you’re going to rely on the residual helium that’s coming out of the tip of the nozzle for some period of time.

In my training classes, I typically have a plastic bottle that has a little right-angle nozzle on it. You may have used them back in high school in chemistry; it might have had alcohol in it. I will squirt a little helium in that plastic bottle and then screw the cap on; that will last me for two or three days at a trade show or a training event. I don’t have to squeeze the bottle. There’s enough helium coming out of the nozzle that you can detect leaks.

To demonstrate, I’ll put hair on an O-ring on a test for the leak detector. (It’s the cause of my receding hairline.) I can take that nozzle without squeezing the bottle and move it near the hair that I put in there, and it will detect it very impressively every single time, at least over the course of two to three days.

Perspective looking up into the world’s largest vacuum chamber at NASA’s facility in Sandusky, Ohio
Source: Dave Deiwert

My point of demoing that is people tend to spray away too much helium. If there’s five parts per million naturally in the air we breathe, you only need enough delta difference so that as you go past where the leak’s at you can see a reaction from the leak detector and pinpoint it.

Backtrack to if somebody sprays a lot of helium to prove they have a leak. Now they have to wait a long time for the helium to dissipate. And by the way it’s not just dissipating from the room. You’ve sprayed a lot of helium that is now feeding that leak. And as it goes through the leak path in the furnace, it expands back out in front of you. It’s got to pump away from the furnace, too. It’s also got to clear the system and go out to the pumps before you get back to baseline so that you can continue leak checking.

Therefore, if you spray just very small amounts,, you have to get close to where the leak is before you start to get a response. This way you have less concern of helium drifting to the opposite side of the furnace and going through a leak path there — that can really distract. You may think you’re near the leak, but it’s really on the other side of the furnace because you’ve sprayed way too much helium.

Spraying little amounts might make you feel like it’s taking longer. But the fact is, when you start to get a reaction at the leak detector, you can be comfortable that you’re getting close to the where the leak is.

Doug Glenn: If you know you’re in a room with air currents in it (let’s just say there’s a flow of some sort from left to right), does it make sense to always start downwind, and then work your way back across the system?

Dave Deiwert: Yes. If I can feel a fan — Joe’s got his fan on because it’s keeping him cool, and it’s blowing over towards where I’m leak testing, I might say, “Hey Joe, could you turn your fan off a little bit while I’m testing?” He may say, “No, it’s making me comfortable.” All right, now I’ve got to work with that. I know that I can feel the air currents moving from my right towards my left. So, yes, starting downwind and working my way up could be helpful. You want to pay attention to what the air is doing if you can tell. It may be a very calm environment, and you’re not sure what the air currents are doing; just be methodical. Pick somewhere to start in the furnace.

Here’s something else about spraying helium: Once you think you know where the leak is at, every time you put the spray nozzle there you should get the same response. You spray the helium, you get a response, you stop spraying and wait until it drops back to baseline, and then you go back to where you think the leak is. If that’s where the leak is, every time you put the probe there, you should get the same response time at the leak detector. If even one time you put the spray gun there and don’t get a response or not nearly the same, then that’s not where the leak is at. Yeah, you should know beyond a shadow of a doubt when you pinpoint the leak.

Doug Glenn: How often do you see more than one leak at a time? Let’s say you isolate a leak, you think you got it, then say you take the gasket off or whatever you do, do the test again, and there’s still a leak.How often does that happen?

Dave Deiwert: It happens most of the time. When I was a field service engineer and somebody called me in to help, I almost never found one leak. That tells me they were working with one leak that maybe wasn’t large enough to affect their quality or the cycle time, and they were living with it. And the day comes where they have a leak that gets their attention or the leak got larger. It can be more challenging if you’ve got more than one leak. It’s a short-lived celebration when you think you found a leak and then you go to start the process, and, oh, it looks like you still have a leak. That wasn’t the one. So, you might make a case for looking to see if you can pinpoint another leak while you’re in the leak testing mode.

Doug Glenn displays the cover of the November 2024 issue of Heat Treat Today, in which Dave Deiwert’s article, “Basics of Vacuum Furnace Leak Detection, Pt 1,” is featured.

Saving on Helium Gas (21:35)

Doug Glenn: Besides the fact that a helium leak detector can save you all kinds of time because typically you can find a leak faster with a helium leak detector then in a process of elimination, you also mentioned a tip for saving money regarding the mixing of the gas. Could you elaborate on that and any other cost savings tips?

Dave Deiwert: I already mentioned that people tend to spray way too much helium at least until they’re sensitive to that concern and cut back. But when they buy the tanks of helium, they’re buying 100% helium. And remember my comment that you just need enough delta increase in the helium that you’re applying to where the leaks at to be able to pinpoint it. The possibility that you could buy your tanks of helium at a lesser percentage, maybe 25% helium and 75% nitrogen, would help you save on some helium and help your efforts to not be spraying too much.

People have not been saying that in this industry, and so that can make folks nervous. “I don’t know, Dave. We’ve never done that before. I’ve never heard anybody else say that before.” I suggest if you are going through a lot of helium, you could cut down how much helium you’re spraying. You could save some significant money, especially these larger facilities with many furnaces and so forth. Give it a try. Buy one tank of it with a mix gas and pick something that you’re comfortable trying, whether it be 25% or 50% helium and buy one bottle. And the next time you test your furnace and find a leak, then try to look at that leak with the lower percentage helium and prove to yourself whether using a lower percentage of helium is going to save you money.

Doug Glenn: You’re suggesting people get themselves comfortable with it, use their 100% until they find the leak, and then try the lower helium.

Dave Deiwert: When they show the proof to themselves, that they can still have the capability to find leaks like that, then they could save a little money. Plus, there’s the added benefit of not spraying so much helium and having to wait as long for the area to clear up before you can start spraying again to continue to pinpoint a leak.

Doug Glenn: And that would save you additional time. Dave, thank you very much. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Dave Deiwert: Only that if you know you’ve got a leak in the system — it failed the leak up test or quality or whatever, you sprayed it around the entire system, and you can’t find any leaks — then you’re probably looking at an internal leak most likely past the seat of a valve. Or maybe you’ve got a vent valve that’s leaking past the seat, but your plumbing to that vent valve maybe goes out of the building, so you don’t really have an easy access to spray helium past that.

For example, with an argon valve, you may need to disconnect the argon supply from that valve so you can get access to that side of the valve to spray helium to see if you can detect a leak past the seat of that valve.

Doug Glenn: Dave, thanks very much, I appreciate it. I’m sure we’ll be talking again. I know vacuum leak detection is an important thing.

About The Guest

Dave Deiwert
President
Tracer Gas Technologies

Dave Deiwert has over 35 years of technical experience in industrial leak detection gained from his time at Vacuum Instruments Corp., Agilent Vacuum Technologies (Varian Vacuum), Edwards Vacuum, and Pfeiffer Vacuum. He leverages this experience by providing leak detection and vacuum technology training and consulting services as the owner and president of Tracer Gas Technologies.

Contact Dave at ddeiwert@gmail.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #116: Basic Practices for Successful Leak Detection Read More »

Under Pressure? Here’s a Stress Relief Round Up

/ Manufacturing Heat Treat Technical Content, STRESS RELIEVING TECHNICAL CONTENT

Did you know that November 6 was National Stress Awareness Day? It seems an appropriate designation to cover the days and weeks that follow Election Day as well as those leading up to the holidays. For many who are well aware of the stress of the events of the season, Heat Treat Today wants to help with a different kind of stress relief.

Today we’re highlighting technical content that we’ve published over the last couple of years about stress relieving processes. Read an overview about stress relieving stainless steel components, listen to a Lunch & Learn dialogue about this underrated process, and explore a mechanical testing method for measuring material strength.

Stainless Corrosion

It is critical to provide things like stainless steel appliances and the Tesla truck with proper maintenance to keep the corrosion resistance and appearance lasting as long as possible.

Stainless steel shines in our kitchens and is becoming more popular in auto showrooms, mostly because of the promise that it is corrosion resistant. What most people don’t realize is that stainless steel will rust in a lot of circumstances. Sarah Jordan explores how stainless steel can be compromised by improper heat treatment and the steps heat treaters can take to prevent corrosion:

“Improper heat treating can also contribute to stress corrosion cracking. When material is quenched, it can cause residual stresses that, if not relieved, can become an issue.

“Corrosion in stainless steel can often be traced to improper heat treatment. When stainless steel is heated between 842–1562°F (450–850°C), chromium carbides can form at the grain boundaries, depleting the surrounding areas of chromium and making them susceptible to corrosion.”

To read the article in full, click here.

Heat Treat Radio #88: Lunch & Learn — 3 Most Underrated Processes

Click on the image to hear this episode of Heat Treat Radio and read the transcript.

In this Lunch & Learn episode from Heat Treat Radio, Dave Mouilleseaux discusses the three most underrated heat treat processes, including stress relieving manufactured components. If a comprehensive analysis of a heat treat operation needs to be performed on a manufactured component, such as a gear or a shaft, it is necessary to take into consideration any prior existing stresses in the part and what effect that has on the part.

The detrimental effects of not having stress relieved
Source: pixabay

“Many times during the course of my career, I’ve had a customer come to me and say, ‘The part I gave you was correct, and you’ve given it back to me and then fill-in-the-blank. It’s warped, it’s changed size, it’s shrunk, all of those things.’

“What have you done in your heat treating process?” asked Mouilleseaux. “You have to back up all the way to the beginning of how this part was manufactured and deal with all of those component steps in order to answer that question properly. Stress relieving is one of the answers. It’s not the answer. It’s not the only answer, but it is one of them that has to be considered.”

To listen to this episode of Lunch & Learn, click here.

Indentation Plastometry

Photograph of the Hardox steel samples, with and without the WC insert attached, showing high levels of oxidation following from the brazing process.
Source: Plastometrex

Mechanical testing is a standard production step in heat treating operations, but conventional methods of testing don’t always yield stress values consistent with the testing calculations.

Indentation plastometry allows users to obtain material strength characteristics in a way that is faster, cheaper, and simpler than conventional mechanical testing procedures. James Dean explores this novel mechanical testing method developed to infuse efficiency and accuracy into the process. 

“The testing process is fully automated and involves three simple steps. The first is the creation of an indent using the indentation plastometer which is a custom-built, macromechanical test machine. The second is measurement of the residual profile shape using an integrated stylus profilometer.

“The third is the analysis of the profile shape in a proprietary software package called SEMPID, which converts the indentation test data into stress-strain curves that are comparable to those that would be measured using conventional mechanical testing methods. The entire procedure takes just a few minutes, and the surface preparation requirements are minimal.”

To read this article in full, click here.

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Heat Treat Radio #114: Decarbonization Demystified at IHEA’s SUMMIT

/ HEAT TREAT NEWS, HEAT TREAT NEWS INDUSTRIES, HEAT TREAT RADIO

Listen as Jeff Rafter, vice president of sales and marketing at Selas Heat Technology and current IHEA president, discusses the upcoming IHEA Decarbonization SUMIMIT with Doug Glenn. Scheduled for October 28-30 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the summit will address the challenges and opportunities of decarbonization for manufacturers. Jeff highlights IHEA’s nearly 100-year history in industry education. The event will feature keynote speakers from the DOE, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and John Deere, with a mix of technical and business content aiming to provide practical strategies for energy management and sustainability. Learn more in this episode of Heat Treat Radio, and learn more about this episode sponsor, IHEA, and their event at summit.ihea.org. 

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

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

The IHEA Decarbonization Summit (01:03)

Doug Glenn: Jeff, when and where is the summit? And what was the driving force behind deciding to do this event?

Jeff Rafter: The IHEA Decarbonization SUMMIT will be at the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana, beginning on Monday, October 28, and ending Wednesday, October 30.

The drive to create this event arose because the IHEA membership had often commented on, and lamented, the frequent inquiries they get from the client base across all sectors of manufacturing; clients are looking for clarification on the ongoing changes of the U.S. energy infrastructure and, specifically, how to manage the requirement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

There is a lot that is changing quickly in the U.S. energy infrastructure around renewables, electrification, and low carbon fuels. he IHEA board felt that it was essential to assist manufacturing members by trying to clarify these topics in an interesting event that presented the information objectively and provided a diverse array of all the decarbonization pathways available to manufacturers today.

IHEA’s Qualifications (02:36)

Doug Glenn: For those who might not know what IHEA is, what makes it uniquely qualified to present such a summit?

Jeff Rafter: I am proud to say that IHEA is a very unique organization. Many trade organizations do not have the long-standing success in supporting members that this organization has. The composition of IHEA, which is close to 100 years old, was originally made up of heating appliance and heating component manufacturers, who have spent most of our history focused on industry education as a service to all the member companies.

We felt that this was the perfect organization to take up the topic of sustainability and decarbonization because we are education focused. From that background and that bias, we are leveraging thousands of years of experience over a broad array of manufacturing options from traditional fossil fuels through electrification. Our member companies provide a very strong basis to deliver real-world examples of how to deal with reducing CO2 emissions.

Doug Glenn: And if I am remembering correctly, IHEA actually has a standing history of cooperation and working with the DOE on different things in the past, correct?

Jeff Rafter: Very good point, Doug. If you look back in history, before “CO2 reduction” and “decarbonization” became buzzwords, we spent a lot of similar efforts working with government organizations, research laboratories, and third-party organizations around topics of NOx reduction and trying to create a cleaner basis of industrial, manufacturing, and energy. In addition, we have always spent our time helping with business concerns regarding efficiency, not only operating successfully heating processes and appliances, but also making manufacturing more cost effective.

Keynote Speakers (04:44)

Doug Glenn: And speaking of the DOE, I see that there are some pretty high-profile speakers coming. The keynote speaker is Dr. Avi Shultz, from the U.S. DOE, and he is on the Industrial Decarbonization Initiative. Other speakers include Paulomi Nandy from Oak Ridge National Lab, Jeff Kaman from John Deere, and Tim Hill from Nucor. Can you give us a sense of what these folks will be talking about?

Dr. Avi Shultz
Director
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
The Industrial Efficiency & Decarbonization Office (IEDO)
Paulomi Nandy
Technical Account Manager, R&D Assistant Staff Member
Manufacturing Energy Efficiency Research Analysis Group (MEERA)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Jeff Kaman
Manager, Energy Supply and Sustainability
John Deere
Tim Hill
General Manager Sustainability Solutions
Nucor
Speakers at the IHEA Decarburization Summit

Jeff Rafter: Doug, we are very excited to have the diverse mix of speakers that will make up the summit presentations. With Dr. Schultz and Miss Nandy, we are very excited to be providing a third-party opinion — government organizations and research laboratories — and they will be presenting on their views of the trends for the future of sustainability and decarbonization.

When we move to some of the other presenters like Tim Hill from Nucor and Mr. Kaman from John Deere, we also wanted members and attendees to take away from the summit real-world experience. These are not imagined or planned changes. We wanted companies that had actual experience with decarbonization — who had even taken actions towards net-zero positions — to share with attendees exactly how they approached the challenges.

Because, of course, some of the issues around sustainability are that it comes at a cost.

And how do you fund that? How do you research that? Where do you look for grants, and how do you make the business case towards decarbonization or any sustainability action for that matter?

Finally, adding to those two bodies of participants, we have a number of presenters speaking about real-world solutions today. IHEA’s view on decarbonization and sustainability is that there is a very broad set of pathways that you can take today with inexpensive, readily available technologies all the way out to longer term solutions like full electrification of processes.

There is more than one way to approach this challenge and do the responsible thing in manufacturing, which is to address our CO2 production globally.

Is Electrification the Only Answer? (07:25)

Doug Glenn: You mentioned electrification. When people hear decarbonization or sustainability, they often think electrification. There may be a lot of people listening saying, “I am primarily combustion. Should I be going?” Are only electrification solutions going to be presented? Or are combustion solutions going to be presented as well to help with the decarbonization?

Jeff Rafter: The answer to that question is, “Yes, you should be going, regardless of whether your focus and your background is in traditional fossil fuel combustion or electrification.”

The summit will contain a very balanced approach of different technologies, presented with no bias. The goal of this summit is providing education to help business leaders make better decisions around their energy management and their environmental concerns.

With that said, when we look at the body of what is available in the agenda, electrification is an important topic. But as a lot of people recognize, some portions of electrification are just relocating to a different fossil fuel further away from the point of use whilst other electrification options linked to renewable energy sources truly can come close to net-zero production of CO2.

IHEA’s view is that there are many sustainability pathways that we can all investigate or pursue.

Some pathways maintain fossil fuel basis. Some industrial processes will be challenged to move to an electric heating source. And then for other processes, electrification is the cat’s meow. So it is that broad sweep of diverse technologies that everyone needs to be educated on to make better decisions when the time comes.

Who Should Attend the Summit? (09:21)

Doug Glenn: How technical will the summit be; do I need to know heavy engineering, metallurgy, and things of that sort? And who should come?

Jeff Rafter: Traditionally, a lot of IHEA’s educational content has been directed at a technical audience; it was technical education about how various energy sources and heating appliances work, how to comply to code, and how to approach the application of that equipment safely. In this particular summit, we have changed course a bit in that we did not want this event to be a technical conference.

The idea of this summit was to make it a business conference because that is where most of the challenges exist when we look at sustainability efforts.

The content that will be presented is a pleasant mix of some technical topics because we have to get a rudimentary understanding of how these different technologies work. However, we are spending just as much time in the presentations addressing business concerns: How do you fund these various actions? Where can you find available grants? What are real-world examples of how other companies have approached sustainability or have begun an initiative internally? How do you get the support and the decision-making decided while moving in the right direction? When you look at the agenda that will be posted on the IHEA website, you will see that the topics range broadly from some technology presentations to real-world business concerns and how to make those business decisions.

Agenda for IHEA Decarburization Summitt, Monday – Wednesday, October 28-30, 2024, in Indianapolis, Indiana

Doug Glenn: How much fun have you had putting this summit together?

Jeff Rafter: I would happily report it has been a tremendous team effort.

I am very proud to say that a lot of IHEA member companies and third parties have stepped up to help us construct this event. We are really looking forward to it being a valuable event that provides a lot of information and important takeaways for participants.

Doug Glenn: I know you have put a lot of work into it. I have watched you do this over the last year and a half, and you have done a great job coordinating it.

Closing Remarks (12:34)

Jeff Rafter: I would just like to say in closing, for anyone who is thinking about coming to the IHEA Decarbonization Summit, please do. This is a very important topic for manufacturers, and you really need to take the approach of not waiting. It is time to get in front of changes in our energy infrastructure and the need to decarbonize some manufacturing processes. This is a great way to get educated and start your plan.

Doug Glenn: And I did remember one other motivation: If you are looking to stay at the hotel where the summit is held, the cutoff date for the hotel (you can still get into the summit even if you do not hit this cutoff date) is October 7th. So anyhow, appreciate it. Jeff, thanks very much for your time.

About The Guest

Jeff Rafter
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Selas Heat Technology Company, LLC
Source: Selas Heat Technology

Jeff Rafter is vice president of sales and marketing for Selas Heat Technology in Streetsboro, Ohio, and has a rich history in the combustion industry, including Maxon Corporation. Jeff has 31 years of industrial experience in sales, research and development, and marketing; combustion application expertise in process heating, metals, refining, and power generation; and 13 years of service on NFPA 86 committee. He holds patents for ultra-low NOx burner design. Additionally, his company, Selas, is an IHEA member, and Jeff is the current president of IHEA as well as one of the driving forces/coordinators behind the upcoming Decarbonization Summit at the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis, October 28-30.

Contact Jeff at jrafter@selas.com.

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