Heat Treatment Process Modeling with HTP Sim

The heat treatment industry faces significant challenges related to time and cost inefficiencies, often caused by inconsistent microstructures and suboptimal recipe designs. To address these issues, the Heat Treatment Process Simulator (HTP Sim) was developed as a solution. By utilizing validated material models from the comprehensive DANTE package, HTP Sim simulates the heat treatment process and provides valuable insights such as phase volume fractions, carbon profiles, and hardness distributions as functions of both time and location. These capabilities enable manufacturers to optimize process parameters, improve microstructure control, and refine heat treatment recipes. This work focuses on using HTP Sim to solve industrial challenges including optimizing processing times, ensuring case depth and surface hardness, predicting carburization and nitriding profiles including carbide formation and dissolution and nitride white layer formation, individual equipment characterization, deep-freeze and tempering process optimization, investigation of process sensitivities in heating and quenching, and investigation of material changes with existing processes. This work will also focus on the requirements for HTP Sim including geometry simplification of many parts to cylinder or ring-shape geometry, applying heat transfer coefficients for modeling, and how to interpret the results.