If you follow trends in the worldwide heat treating industry you will get the impression that vacuum carburizing systems have taken over North America and the world. Is this the truth or merely very good marketing on the part of 7 the VC manufacturers? In this article, we have a look at how many systems have actually been installed or sold in North America by manufacturer. To start off our series we can give you pretty definite numbers on two manufactures, Seco Warwick and Surface Combustion.

Seco (Meadville, PA) has been very successful with the smaller two chamber systems.

Beth Ryan at Seco very kindly and promptly gave us this information:

“We have 16 vacuum carburizing systems in the USA, none in Canada. This is the thing, we have 40 HPQ furnaces that can be upgraded to do vacuum carburizing with an updated hot zone and the addition of the FineCarb control system, so everyone who has purchased this furnace can upgrade quite easily. Our standard HPQ has convection heating and a very sophisticated control system which makes this possible. While everybody at Seco is responsible I feel that Janusz Kowalewski, who I call "an army of one" is most responsible for the success of these systems.”

Surface Combustion, founded in 1915 Surface (Maumee, Ohio, USA) is one of the largest furnace builders in North America. While they were rather slow getting involved in the vacuum carburizing business they have (to the best of our knowledge) sold two systems in North America, both to commercial heat treaters. One of these systems went to MMS Thermal Processing in Davenport Iowa, the other to Specialty Heat Treating in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Below you will find more details about the Surface systems and our original announcements.

'“All companies today are seeking an edge - a way to differentiate themselves from their competition. MMS Thermal Processing, LLC, a new metals heat treating company located in Davenport, Iowa, found that edge by taking advantage of the product offerings from the joint marketing effort of Air Products (NYSE: APD) and Surface Combustion, Inc. The result of this combined effort provided this recent entrant into the heat treat market with the most advanced heat treat system available today. Air Products and Surface Combustion have a combined 8 140 years of experience in the global metals industry. Under their joint marketing agreement, they offer solutions that enable heat treat customers to reduce operating costs and enhance product quality and competitiveness. The two companies provide a complementary portfolio of integrated product offerings to the heat treat industry, including a variety of industrial gases, services, technologies, atmosphere generating equipment, thermal processing equipment and process-related know-how. "Through collaboration with Surface Combustion, we can better serve our mutual customers with a broad range of heat treating atmosphere and equipment solutions," said Stewart Stringer, Air Products' Metals Industry marketing manager. "Our technology allows us to provide the nitrogen and gas handling systems to meet the needs of customers and monitor gas inventories - making it a full service solution. The customer can focus on production and not worry about its industrial gas supply." MMS Thermal purchased Surface Combustion's new MultiChamber Vacuum Carburizing System utilizing VringCARB(R) technology and companion equipment. This new technology uses cyclohexane as the carburizing source. There are several benefits of using cyclohexane, traditionally used in the manufacture of nylon, in this novel application. Liquid cyclohexane is injected into the furnace hot zone producing a vapor distribution around the workload pieces, resulting in very uniform carburizing. Additionally, when compared to conventional hydrocarbons, cyclohexane has great resistance to thermal decay and greatly minimizes carbon drop-out in the furnace or on workloads. It is also a very clean carburizing process and results in a cleaner furnace chamber and carburized parts that are not discolored. A nitrogen delivery system was necessary, and Air Products worked closely with Surface Combustion and MMS Thermal to meet the customer's requirements. MMS needed gaseous nitrogen for its high-pressure gas quench process and liquid nitrogen (minus 320 degree) for its cryogenic treatment process. To help MMS operate both processes as efficiently as possible, Air Products designed, installed and inspected the nitrogen systems. Air Products installed three house-lines - a high-pressure line to operate at approximately 360 psi, a low-pressure line to operate at 100 psi; and a vacuum-jacketed line to handle the cryogenic liquid. To lower costs, a special high-pressure vaporization system was installed. Air Products also installed a nitrogen supply monitoring safety system (Air Products NSMS system), which provides an alarm to the operator if the nitrogen supply system is unable to perform a safe purge of the furnaces in an emergency. MMS Thermal's nitrogen tanks are also equipped with Air Products' TELALERT(R) telemetry system, which connects the tanks through a phone line to Air Products' product supply team and fleet dispatchers in Allentown, 9 Pa. This team monitors customer gas use and the nitrogen tank levels to forecast optimized delivery schedules. "Both Surface Combustion and Air Products have provided us with valuable technical assistance in the installation and start-up of the unit," said Bob Zattau, sales manager for MMS Thermal. "We plan to use our expertise, along with that of Surface Combustion, Air Products, and our customers, to design unique solutions that reduce the total cost of manufacturing gears, shafts, bearings and other critical metal parts."'

 Looking to Grenoble; France based ECM who, while not the pioneer, (this honor goes to CI Hayes of Rhode Island, USA) was still one of the very first to get involved in this technology with a pilot installation at ECM in 1989 after which followed an installation at Dongkook in South Korea in 1990. According to Dennis Beauchesne, USA Sales Manager for ECM they now have sold over 105 cells in the USA and 195 in North America (the difference between the numbers being the ones installed in the US and installed in Mexico. There are also two used ECM systems purchased by Linamar Gear, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada which were bought used from a General Motors facility in Romania). One important difference to note between ECM and Seco Warwick (as an example) is that Seco has been very successful with the smaller single chamber systems while ECM is very strong in the multi cell systems meaning that one gas quench cell (or sometimes both a gas and oil quench cell) handles all the carburizing units. ECM have produced anywhere up to 12 cell system (Bosch, Czech Republic), but the norm is 4 to 8 carburizing cells as you will see at installations such as Getrag Gears, Midwest Thermal Vac, Daimler Chrysler, Kokomo, Indiana, USA, Ford Sharonville, Ohio, Bodycote, Michigan, USA and a number of other facilities. This means that if you look at the number of cells probably this equates to at least 35-40 total systems. Incidentally the Ford, Ohio plant is probably the largest ECM installation and is one of (if not the largest) VC operations in North America. ECM has done well with Vacuum Carburizing technology. Next up we look at a few other major players in the VC business, ALD, CI Hayes and Ipsen International.

Now looking at ALD-Holcroft, a joint venture between ALD (Germany) and AFC-Holcroft Wixom, Michigan, USA. This venture was formed a few years to design and build ALD Vacuum Carburizing Systems for the North American market. Jack Titus of ALD-Holcroft very kindly gave us this summary of the number of systems they have installed in North America.  

 “In N.A. we have three (3) continuous LPC and pressure quench systems, 42 individual LPC modules, seven (7) additional pressure quench and three(3) deoiling modules at seven (7) locations.” (Editors note; the continuous systems are a “pusher” style with 20 Bar quenching. The ALD design is in some ways similar to the ECM in that they both utilize multiple carburizing cells working in conjunction with one quenching cell. This is why Jack mentioned 42 individual LPC modules or carburizing cells. These figures do not include 18 carburizing cells with 20 bar quenching that will be installed at the ALD Thermal Treatment centre in Mexico). “ALD-Holcroft a joint venture between ALD GmbH of Germany and AFC-Holcroft of Wixom, MI and in combination with AFC-Holcroft is developing new flexible quench LPC products designed to provide the ultimate in process versatility to the North American heat treat market. HPGQ (high pressure gas quenching) and LPC systems long thought of as "joined at the hip" are being expanded via ALD-H’s ModulTherm® modular LPC concept to offer unmatched quenching performance for low hardenability steels as well as high alloy materials while maintaining distortion control.”

We have now looked at three of the major suppliers of new vacuum carburizing systems in North America. ECM, Seco Warwick, ALD-Holcroft and Surface Combustion which means we have two left, Ipsen International and CI Hayes.

Ipsen International (the largest manufacturer of new vacuum furnaces in North America) declined to share with us the number of VC systems they have installed in NA, which is of course their perogative. We know of 5 large Ipsen “pusher” style Vacuum Carburizers at Stackpole in Mississauga, Canada but beyond that we are only aware of four or five other installations.

The real wildcard when coming up with the total number of systems is a company that no longer even makes vacuum carburizers, CI Hayes. Based in Rhode Island, USA CI Hayes was the first company to actively build and market VC systems in North America (we have included a news item about CI Hayes which gives you their background). We have always heard that Hayes built literally hundreds of these units but how many remain in operation is very hard to know. The most educated guess we have heard is about 20 still remain in operation. So we now end up with 16 Seco Warwick systems installed and in operation in NA, ALD has 3 continuous systems and 42 cells in operation, ECM with 195 cells in Canada, USA and Mexico, Surface with 2 systems, Ipsen with at least 5 continuous systems installed and CI Hayes with roughly 20 systems still in operation. When we try and come up with the total number of furnaces in use in NA do we count each cell in an ALD or ECM system as one furnace or count a system consisting of 6 or 8 cells as one furnace? Take your pick but if you count each cell as a furnace (which in our opinion you should) you end up with almost 300 furnaces/cells in operation in NA. Still a tiny % of the overall heat treating market but still quite significant.

July 2007