Top Heat Treatment News Stories for the Week of July 22/2024
“The Monty Heat Treat News” Team constantly monitors the levels of interest for each of our news items, through our website and monthly magazine and also views on social media. Based upon this we are able to tell you, our readers, the most popular news items for each week. For the week starting Monday July 22, 2024 our top 3 news items included a rumor about a very large Hot Isostatic Press order in Europe, a story about a captive heat treater in the US Northwest adding a new Gasbarre, continuous annealing furnace and a “Heat Treat Podcast” with one of our favorites in the industry, Mr. Bob Hill of Solar Atmospheres.
New Hot Isostatic Press Order? For many years Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) occupied a fairly small but stable portion of the heat treatment market-when we think of the process, we think of castings for the aerospace industry. “Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) is a proven process for heat treatment, consolidation of powder, densification of products – such as castings, sintered materials, and ceramic parts – or for diffusion bonding applications. While HIP has been around for decades, we are seeing new applications in high-performance parts.” A more detailed description can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_isostatic_pressing
While the market for HIP remained relatively unchanged for many years, this slowly starting changing a few years back and it now represents a very fast growing segment of the heat treat market with a number of very large installations over the past 5 years-this brings us to today’s “rumor” about a new large installation.
Our understanding is that a Western European commercial heat treater will be investing in a system from Quintus, a Swedish company and one of the larger players in this highly specialized arena. The rumor we are hearing is that the system will be a QIH 286 model, one of the larger presses that Quintus offers and that it is an investment of well over $20 million USD. The photo attached shows a typical Quintus QIH 286 press. https://themonty.com/new-hot-isostatic-press-order/?no_cache=1721915013
Chromalox Expansion Includes Gasbarre Continuous Annealing Furnace; In October 2023 “Chromalox” announced that they were making a major investment in their manufacturing facility in Ogden, Utah, USA an investment which includes more heat treat capacity-this announcement can be found further down. Part of this investment included a mesh belt annealing furnace from furnace manufacturer Gasbarre, a furnace which has just been received at the plant;
“Our Chromalox facility in Ogden, Utah has just taken delivery of a new state-of-the-art annealing furnace from GASBARRE in Pennsylvania. We are excited about this latest investment in new equipment, which is part of a multi-year modernization plan for our current furnace inventory worldwide and supports our goal to decarbonize our manufacturing processes, aligned with the Spirax Group One Planet Sustainability Strategy. Construction is underway to expand and modernize our facility in Ogden and the upgrades we are making to the furnaces will significantly reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the plant.” https://themonty.com/chromalox-expansion-includes-gasbarre-continuous-annealing-furnace/
The “Heat Treat Podcast” Speaks With Bob Hill of “Solar Atmospheres”; This week our intelligent, handsome and witty host Mr. Carlos Torres of the “Heat Treat Podcast” speaks with Mr. Bob Hill, President of commercial heat treat “Solar Atmospheres of Western PA” and “Solar Atmospheres of Michigan”. The entire team at “The Monty Heat Treat News” have known Bob for a number of years and have always had a very high impression of the man-we have been looking forward to hearing him share his knowledge about heat treating Titanium and “Super Alloys” which he does today.
We have to add that “Solar Atmospheres of Western PA” is a very unique in that they have the largest car bottom vacuum furnaces we have seen anywhere in the world; this photo shows one of them when it was inaugurated a few of years back. In this picture we see Mr. Gord Montgomery and Mr. Bill Jones CEO of Solar Atmospheres and Solar Manufacturing. https://themonty.com/the-heat-treat-podcast-speaks-with-bob-hill-of-solar-atmospheres/
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