Generally speaking any process that applies heat to material can be classed as heat treatment, whether that is part of the treatment of metals, wood, ceramics, composites etc... MSL Heat Treatment Specialise in the Vacuum Heat Treatment and Vacuum Brazing of metals including steels, copper alloys, nickel alloys, and many more materials that can benefit from vacuum furnace treatment.
Heat treatment is important and widely used as it can alter the properties of materials in beneficial ways or otherwise benefit the performance of the materials treated.
Vacuum heat treatment is a fantastic process to control the quality of heat treatment. By processing in a vacuum, the reduction of reactive gases (particularly oxygen) around the material minimise surface reactions with the process environment, so that parts exit the furnace as clean (and often cleaner) than they went in. This helps remove the need for post heat treatment cleaning and finishing processes, and is especially beneficial for components used in the food processing, medical, automotive and aerospace industries where minimising contamination is of vital importance. Vacuum furnaces also exhibit excellent temperature uniformity and control, producing repeatable results batch to batch.
A common question where the most important consideration is what
grade of stainless steel? There are thousands of grades of steel and stainless steel, which can be hardened to varying extents and through various different processes. When it comes to hardening stainless steels, very roughly they can be split into four categories
Vacuum heat treatments are carried out for a variety of different reasons, whether material need to be softened via annealing, hardened or age hardened, stress relieved to remove stress caused during manufacturing, or to join parts together through brazing. Due to the clean process environment, vacuum heat treatments can also be carried out to clean components, and the low-pressure environment can also help contaminants outgas from material, improving performance of parts that themselves have to operate inside vacuum systems. Heat treatment is not a widely understood process, and there is a wide variety of different processes, so it is not uncommon for customers to not know the specifics or technical definitions of the processes they require. Our heat treatment engineers and metallurgists are on hand to offer advice and guidance on selecting the right process for your products and materials.