Energy Savings Through Steady State Control

Modern heat treat companies are faced with challenges trying to balance work-flow, processing time, and production/energy costs. Unnecessarily long processing times induce extra costs when an automated process cannot tell the true temperature of a load and the engineer must increase soak times to accommodate. These increased soak times use more energy and increase overall production costs. Typically, control or load thermocouples in an oven or furnace only show the wall temperature, and normally only parts of the load. However, the real interest is in what temperature the load actually has reached inside and when is the temperature uniform throughout the whole work piece. Normally, to accommodate for this lack of knowledge in a ramp/soak program, the dwell-time is extended to ensure that the temperature is uniform without truly knowing. Instead, using a method for predicting load uniformity, or Steady State Control, would save time, energy, and, most importantly, money.