Heat Treatment from jiachuancasting's blog

Heat treatment is the controlled process of heating and cooling materials to improve their properties, properties and strength. Most metals and alloys are heat treated in one way or another, and the understanding and science of heat treatment has evolved over the past 100 to 125 years. The importance of heat treatment is evident in many products in the automotive, aerospace, construction, agriculture, mining and consumer goods industries, all of which use heat treatment to improve the properties of materials, especially steel.

Heat treatment adds about $15 billion in value to metal products each year, about 80 percent of which is steel.

Heat treatment is a manufacturing process in which a material (usually a metal or alloy) is altered by cycles of heating and cooling under complex thermal boundary conditions and a wide temperature range. Heat treatment defines the quality of the product in terms of microstructure, mechanical properties, residual stress and dimensional accuracy [3].

Heat Treatment Basics

The heat treatment process can be used for ferrous metals such as cast iron, AHSS, stainless steel and other alloy steels, as well as non-ferrous metals such as aluminum, magnesium, titanium, copper or brass [2].

The heat treatment process requires the following three main steps [2]:

Heating materials to specific temperatures (ranging up to 2400 °F / 1316 °C)

Soak or hold at a specific temperature for a period of time (ranging from a few seconds to over 60 hours)

Cool at an appropriate rate according to the prescribed method. Materials can be cooled quickly, slowly (in a furnace), or quenched (using water, brine, oil, polymer solutions, salt, or gas).