The Use of Low Pressure Carburizing and High Pressure Gas Quenching For In-Line Heat Treat Processing

The evolution of Low Pressure Vacuum Carburizing in the automotive industry is well embedded in assembly plants with continuous batch loading. This batch loading, which causes a need for high cost WIP (work In Progress), can now be reduced with the Low Pressure Vacuum Carburizing furnace equipment being sized to fit into a single piece flow line with small batches. This presentation will look into the recent integration of heat treatment for in-line machining cells and the overall influences for the customer to provide equipment for heat treating in-line. These details will be compared to batch or continuous batch heat treatment as we know it today in the automotive industry. High Pressure gas quenching will be illustrated in both in-line and batch integration.