What is Heat Treatment?
Recently “The Monty Heat Treat News” has had two articles about the size of the global heat treatment market; https://themonty.com/global-heat-treatment-market-size/ and https://themonty.com/global-heat-treatment-market-size-2/
As “The Monty Team” pointed out, the most difficult part about coming up with an accurate summary of the heat treatment market is determining what actually constitutes heat treating. Luckily for us Mr. Mark VanAlstine of General Motors in Michigan very kindly provided us with this summary, a summary based upon industry standard CQI-9. Thank you Mark.
“I distinguish heat treatment from “thermal processing” which is any process which uses temperature, including casting, forging, welding, intermediate thermal treating, etc.
For my purposes, I define heat treatment as ‘any application of heat which impacts the final part characteristics’. Basically, if CQI-9 should apply, its heat treatment. In that way, something like annealing in a mill would only count as heat treatment if the finished part is still in the same thermal condition. – This is tricky since the final use is not necessarily visible to the person doing the thermal processing. If its an anneal for cold formability that goes through additional heat treatment, the 1st process isn’t ‘heat treatment’ for my purposes. This is really driven by a focus on what is delivered to the customer and ensuring adequate quality controls.
I also consider all sintering to be “sinter hardening” and therefore the process table applies for all sintering, not just sintering with a quench – After all, the consolidated part has much higher hardness than the green part. Baking of an electroless plating would also be HT, since the plating hardness relies on this operation.”
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