Thermal treatment is the process of conferring special properties on metals by heating and cooling them in controlled atmosphere ovens. The most common thermal treatments are hardening and tempering, case hardening and nitriding, etc.
Thermal treatments are commonly applied to copper, aluminium, carbon and stainless steels.
At high temperature, metal becomes easily oxidised, so oxygen must be excluded from the oven atmosphere and replaced by an inert gas, normally in the form of nitrogen. Large quantities of nitrogen are therefore used in thermal treatment processes.
Some special treatments require the use of hydrogen, which can also be generated on site.
Solution
Claind’s solution involves the installation of a nitrogen source capable of fully satisfying the requirements of the thermal treatment process and eliminating the need to maintain a liquid nitrogen tank.
The central gas generation plant and accumulator tank must be of adequate size to satisfy not only average demand but demand peaks as well. This is quite feasible with continuous cycle ovens in which washing peaks have only a limited incidence.
Similar solutions can be adopted for thermal treatments in a hydrogen atmosphere.
Benefits
- Economical: between 70% and 300% savings in the cost of nitrogen
- Independence from compressed and liquid gas suppliers
- Flexible modular system, expandable in time without replacements
- Operational safety, thanks to the fact that the nitrogen is generated at low pressure and is only stored in small quantities
Associated products
Nitrogen generators FLO, PICO, MAXI series
Hydrogen generators HG MAX