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Heat Treat Radio #118: Saving Dollars with Ceramic Fiber Insulation

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, Mark Rhoa, Jr. from Chiz Bros, a company specializing in ceramic fiber products, discusses insulation with host Doug Glenn. Mark focuses on the benefits of ceramic fiber in industrial applications. The conversation covers decarbonization, the importance of insulation and thermal shock resistance, the shift to electrically heated modules, and practical maintenance tips for ceramic fiber-insulated furnaces.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #118: Saving Dollars with Ceramic Fiber Insulation

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:30)

Doug Glenn: I want to welcome our guest today: Mark Rhoa Jr. from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Mark’s been involved with the industry for quite a while with Chiz Bros, our sponsor for today. Mark is also a Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 honoree from the Class of 2021. And, Mark, could you tell me who started your company — your dad or your dad and his brother? I don’t know the history that well.

Mark Rhoa: My dad actually joined the company in ‘97, but when he joined, Chiz Bros. had been around for a good 30 years or so. It was started by the Chiz brothers originally: Al, Ray, and John Chiz. As they got older and some of them moved on from the company to retire, my dad took over the company in 2014, and that’s when I came on board.

I’ve been here about ten years. And Ray Chiz Jr. just recently retired; he is one of the original owners’ sons who was working here running our warehouse. He’s the last with the Chiz name to work here. We say that the Chiz haircut is kind of what I’ve got going on. You can know by the haircut there’s a lot of Chiz’s still working here, and you might even be an honorary.

Doug Glenn: I can be an honorary, for sure. I don’t have enough on the side.

Chiz has been around for 50 some years doing specialty solutions for refractory applications in the metals, power, glass, and ceramics industries. And you guys deal with multinational companies as well as the small Ma and Pa shop furnace manufacturers or heat treaters/thermal processors, a pretty good mix. You’ve got great customer service, reasonable pricing, and quick delivery. And I know you and I have talked about how you guys pride yourselves on having a lot of stuff in stock. And finally, you guys have your Pittsburgh location and are also in Detroit, which is a relatively new addition, right?

Mark Rhoa: Yeah, about two years ago we opened up a Detroit warehouse. We’ve always had some good clients up that way. You’ve got to have some boots on the ground to be super effective. I say to get the easy orders you’ve got to have the stuff on the ground to get the hard orders, which are the phone calls at 5 o’clock on a Friday saying, “Hey, we need to pick this up because the furnace is down.” And we didn’t have that opportunity to improve our customer service up there before opening that location.

We try to punch above our weight to compete with the big guys on pricing. We make sure we’re always still answering the phone.

Doug Glenn: It makes a huge difference when you’ve actually got people answering the phone.

My understanding is that you provide castables, fibers, brick, etc. But today we want to hone in a little bit on ceramic fiber.

Mark Rhoa: Ceramic fiber is the big portion of our business. We’re one of the biggest Unifrax (Alkegen) ceramic fiber distributors in the country. So, a lot of what we do is being driven by ceramic fiber products we supply. We still can supply castables, bricks, and everything in between. But ceramic fiber drives the ship for us.

What Is Ceramic Fiber? (04:58)

Doug Glenn: Let’s talk about that. Most of our listeners are folks with their own in-house heat treat. But let’s assume we’ve got some people watching that don’t know some basics.

Tell us about ceramic fiber: What is it? How is it made? What are we using it for?

Mark Rhoa: I describe it to people who may not know much about it by comparing it to the Pink Panther insulation that people may recognize up in their roof or in their walls. Ceramic fiber is white, but picture that insulation for 2300°F. That’s what ceramic fiber is, and it’s a form that we sell the most of right now.

You can take that and cut gaskets out of it. You can form it into hard boards through a vacuum forming process. You can take it folded into what we call ceramic fiber modules; your furnace probably has modules in it if it’s a traditional gas-fired or electric furnace. Ceramic fiber products typically aren’t used on the vacuum side of things. People with all vacuum furnaces are probably not going to be using ceramic fiber. There are cloths that are ceramic fiber based as well. There’s a bunch of other ways it’s used.

Ceramic fiber is made of a blown, spun glass. Essentially what you’re doing is dropping the liquid aluminum silica mixture, and it gets blown or blown and spun at super high temperatures. I’m not going to get into the details of the differences there, but whether the stream is blown or is spun on wheels will determine the tensile strength of blanket.

In the grand scheme of things, what you’re doing is collecting all that fiber and getting it onto a mechanism that’s moving along a conveyor belt. Then it’s getting needled from each side to interlock the fibers to make a 26” wide blanket. It’s going to be trimmed off an inch when it goes through, and at the end you have a 24” wide x 1” thick, 8-pound density roll coming out.

Those densities can vary based on how much fiber is going into it. It’s pounds per cubic foot. But when you’re using a 1” thick piece, it’s divided by twelve from a weight standpoint. The fiber you’re needling in there determines the density.

And there are slightly different chemistries for 2300°F, 2600°F, and the most expensive would be 3000°F polycrystalline. The process to make that is a little bit different, too.

But most people are probably more interested in what we’re doing with it. What’s the Chris Farley line in Tommy Boy? We’ll keep it PG, but “take a butcher’s word for it” — take our word for it; it’s made the right way.

Now we can get into how it’s actually used.

Doug Glenn: It’s basically like insulation in your house, like you said. That’s probably the best description of it for people that need to know. But it can obviously go to a much higher temperature.

In an industrial setting, why would you use fiber versus a castable or brick?

Why Fiber? (08:28)

Mark Rhoa: Ceramic fiber is a great insulator. We’ll probably get into why a better insulator is important for decarbonization efforts and things like that.

It’s certainly a better insulator than castables, easy to install, and easy to use. The main reason it’s preferred is for its insulating value and ability to have varying temperature ranges, which you can certainly do with castables and brick.

But to put brick in a wall 12” thick, for argument’s sake, you will need four layers of 3” brick on there. With ceramic fiber, you can take one 12” x 12” module, shoot it onto the shell, attach it, and be good to go from there.

The main thing would be longevity and stuff like thermal shock value. One of the things you have to worry about with castables and brick — maybe not as much with IFB but standard brick — is the heat cycling. Heat treat furnaces are a great example of that.

That door is opening up a lot, so the air is coming in there. People probably see it in their furnaces. The castable is going to want to crack because it’s not designed for thermal shock like ceramic fiber is.

There are certainly applications that you wouldn’t want to use ceramic fiber for. If you’re looking at a traditional heat treat furnace, it depends on how the load is supported: If the floor is the refractory, it is actually supporting the load, and you’re going to want some sort of brick, some sort of castable. Fiber is going to be soft, compressed, and get beat up. You can’t necessarily put it everywhere, but there are areas where it may be up for debate on.

You can use a brick or you can use fiber in the wall. Traditionally, you’re going to use fiber for the insulated value, thermal shock value, installation, and weight; it’s a lot lighter.

A lot of heat treating furnaces are small compared to the massive furnaces in steel melting. They’re going to ship heat treating furnaces. With ceramic fiber, a 12” x 12” fiber module, 12” thick, weighing roughly 12–14 lbs. is 5–10x lighter than brick or castable.

Repairability (10:51)

Doug Glenn: How about addressing the repairability issues between castable and brick and fiber?

Mark Rhoa: Fiber, especially if you’re getting into higher temperatures, can have some shrinkage to it. But you’re able to repair fiber a lot easier. If you wreck a little bit of fiber, you can get in there and get it repaired quickly. With a brick or castable everything’s tied together as either a monolithic piece or a bunch of bricks that are connected, it can start to become a house of cards scenario where you pull and one goes down then everything goes down.

Doug Glenn: It’s like a Jenga game. You pull that brick out on the bottom and what happens?

Figure 2. “You don’t want to pull out the wrong brick.”

Mark Rhoa: Yeah, you don’t want to pull the wrong brick.

Doug Glenn: You already mentioned the temperature ranges we’re talking about. The standard bottom temperature is 2300°F; the fibers are good up to 2300°F. Then you’ve got 2600°F and then 3000°F. Is that roughly the breakdown when you’re looking at fibers?

Mark Rhoa: I don’t know why they ended up doing this, but for 2300°F ceramic fiber, realistically you only want to use it to 2150°F. That goes along with the shrinkage curve of it. I forget the exact number, but I think it’s like in 24 hours, you get less than 3% shrinkage. Typically, the rule of thumb is that you don’t want to use that full temperature range; you want to give yourself 150°F of cushion to be safe. It will still have shrinkage after that up to that temperature.

I don’t know who ever thought of that; it was probably some genius marketing guy to get a little extra.

Fiber Shrinkage (12:57)

Doug Glenn: You’ve mentioned shrinkage a couple different times. Why does that happen with ceramic fiber? And how does that impact installation?

Mark Rhoa: When ceramic fiber hits its operating temperatures, it shrinks up. On the chemistry side, I don’t have an answer there. But we factor in compression to help alleviate when something shrinks. It’s already pushing out against something. It still keeps its resiliency (it wants to pop back out), and that’s factored into every design.

If you’re doing 12” modules, you’ll have a batten strip between them. That makes up for some of the shrinkage that may come where there’s not compression. Any sort of design we would do, or probably anyone would do, is going to factor in shrinkage. You don’t want to just put something in there, and when it shrinks, it leaves a gap. You want to make sure you have something in there that’s going to fill that gap; and that’s typically for modules.

Now if you’re getting to a low temperature, we’re talking about a furnace at 1200°F, you’re not going to have to worry about shrinkage. Even in some of those furnaces, you’ll see designs we call wallpaper — a pin’s exposed and you’re layering on top of it. You’re just kind of overlapping gaps, but you’re not going to have any shrinkage there, so you don’t really have to worry.

Figure 3. Avoiding gaps when shrinkage occurs

Doug Glenn: There is one question I did want to ask you when we were talking about the different temperature ranges of 2300°F, 2600°F, and 3000°F. Are the chemistries between those different?

Mark Rhoa: They’re all alumina silica based. 2300°F is like 50% alumina and 40% silica. They’ll typically inject some zirconia in it, maybe around 15% zirconia. That gives it the extra boost. Alumina is what drops down.

We don’t want to get into every example, but it does have a lower aluminum content. Sometimes in aluminum melting you can get some flexing because there’s zirconia in there, so you need to know the exact application.

And then the polycrystalline, what people call the 3000°F, would be 72% alumina. And that’s made in a calcined process. The 72% alumina is the key factor.

You can also have super high aluminum blankets. Saffil® is the typical brand name. And that’s a 95% plus alumina. That’s for high hydrogen atmospheres, stuff where there’s bad attacking, bad off gassing. The alumina is usually more resilient to that. Some aerospace applications have that stuff spected in for effectiveness and also because they probably have government money. Why not pay for the highest quality, most expensive thing, right?

Electric Element Modules (18:32)

Doug Glenn: You mentioned modules before, but I want to take a little bit of a different angle. The modules you were talking about have no type of heating element in them. They’re just simply the insulating modules that you put on the side of the wall, side by side, maybe alternating the orientation. But what I want to talk about are electric element modules. Can you describe what those are and why you are using them? And maybe hit on the decarbonization or electrification element of those?

Mark Rhoa: Traditional fiber modules are used in a gas furnace, even an electric furnace that may be heated by glow bars or radiant tubes or something like that. That’s going to have a similar penetration there.

One of the systems we call our ELE system. I’d say in the last two years we’ve probably had as many inquiries or conversations about going to these electrically heated modules than we have in the past 5–10 years combined. A lot of that has to do with companies wanting to get away from gas, or they’ve got pressures for different environmental or cost saving reasons.

What we’re doing with that is hanging the elements on the ceramic fiber module. And when they show the pictures of this one, there’ll be one in there. But that allows us to do a modular system where they can get a lot of power on those walls, and it lets us keep a lot of the same insulating value from using modules without having to use brick or a super heavy element in the sidewalls for support.

When someone says we’re putting this many BTUs of gas; here’s the load, size, weight. We do the electric calculations to see how many kilowatts of power we need to pump into this furnace and elements in order to heat something up just like you would do with gas.

And rest assured, someone a lot smarter than me does those calculations. I’m just a pretty face that gets to sell them. But this is something that we’re seeing a lot of. There’s a big push coming from the government and boards of directors.

Doug Glenn: It’s going to help companies reduce their carbon footprint if that is their desire.

I have a question for you about those and specifically about installation. If every module needs a power source, do you have to punch a hole in the furnace wall for every module, or can you interlink them and only have one power source at the end of the chain?

Mark Rhoa: Good question. I didn’t do a good job describing that, but the modules will still go in just like a regular module. They actually have an extra set of ceramic tubes in them. When we do our design, we know where the elements are going to be hung.

If you have a 10-foot wall, you’re not going to have ten 1-foot pieces of element. You’re going to have an eight foot string of elements along that wall, and they will be hooked into the loops. One end of the hook will go on a loop, the other end will go on the ceramic tube that’s inside the module.

If you have a 12’ x 12’ high wall, and you may have a 10’ element in there, you’re probably only going to have four penetrations, maybe more. It’s not going to look like Swiss cheese. They’re going to be linked together.

These are all based on the number of zones in a furnace, too. Some super high aerospace applications are going to have everything super fine tuned just like it is with burners. If you think about how certain applications require way more precision and control over burners, the same thing can be true for these elements, too. The more precision and control you need, the more complicated it’s going to be just like it is with burners.

Before you hang the elements, you could look in that furnace and it would look just the same as a regular gas-fired furnace without the burners. Then you start hooking the elements on the walls. And the pictures of it are helpful.

If anyone has seen Home Alone, he goes into his basement and his furnace is shooting out all the flames. If you walk into a plant and can see that, getting that to seal will prevent heat from leaving.
Mark Rhoa

Furnace Doors (23:52)

Doug Glenn: When I think about ceramic fiber (which you don’t often see it inside a furnace if the door is closed), but a lot of times you’ll see it jammed in around the doors. To me it doesn’t look like that’s the way it’s supposed to be. So, doors are an issue, right? Can ceramics help with that?

Mark Rhoa: In heat treating furnaces, the temperatures aren’t totally crazy like forging furnaces where there’s a lot of shrinkage so they’re replacing it all the time. In heat treat, the temperature is lower. The main wear and tear items we see when we’re working on a repair with a client are around the doors because they’re getting the mechanical abuse of constantly changing. In some of the decarbonization talks I’ve attended and given at trade shows, we’re really looking at ways to save heat. Just making sure your door is sealed properly can do wonders.

If anyone has seen Home Alone, he goes into his basement and his furnace is shooting out all the flames. If you walk into a plant and can see that, getting that to seal will prevent heat from leaving.

You hear all these decarbonization talks, you see all these millions of dollars being thrown around, and, really, you can make a huge difference on a shoestring budget by simply making sure your door is sealing the way it’s supposed to seal.

If you can see the heat coming out, it’s like dollars flying out of your furnace on a game show. You’d have people lined up for that every day of the week.

So you hit the nail right on the head there. A really small, easy way to make a calculated decarbonization effort is making sure you have a door plan or you’re changing it.

It’s the same thing with tuning burners. Little tunes to a burner can save tons of gas and tons of CO₂.

Figure 5. Heat leakage from doors needing maintenance

Doug Glenn: Making sure you’re maintaining good flame curtains on a continuous furnace, all that stuff just keeps the heat from coming out.

Did I see correctly that you guys do door repairs?

Mark Rhoa: We’ll do door repairs in our own shop. If someone ships a door to us, we’ll do the realigns there. About 20 years ago, we stopped having our outside contracting arm. Now we’re not doing any of the fieldwork. But we do realign doors in our shop.

Fiber is pretty easy to work with. Door perimeters are something that can easily be done by someone’s own maintenance crew. Maybe they’ll need one of our sales guys there making sure they do it right the first couple times. But it’s not a hard thing to do. If you have a 12 inch module perimeter, switch those 40 modules out once a year and you’ve got fresh gas savings.

Ceramic Maintenance (27:07)

Doug Glenn: Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about typical maintenance of ceramic-insulated furnace. What do we need to be careful about? Any tips you can offer?

Mark Rhoa: There’s another really affordable thing you can do. You can probably sometimes see this if you have a hot spot where paint’s chipping off or melting or if you have a temperature gun you can find those hot spots. If you see heat on the outside, then you’re typically going to see some sort of crack or gap on the inside. Make sure you have scheduled maintenance downtime with your furnace and stuff in any of those cracks.

If you’ve got a really big furnace or a continuous furnace, roller hearth, furnace type thing, the roll seals are some of the areas where you’re going to end up losing a lot of heat because there’s more wear and tear there. There’s just more opportunity for expansion and contraction.

We do have ceramic pumpable products. We call it liquid ceramic fiber for when there’s a hot spot on a furnace, it’s a big one, and you can’t get in there, you can drill a little hole on it, pump it in from the backside, and fill that up. You don’t want to start making your furnace Swiss cheese and poking holes.

It can be a quick stopgap. If you can’t get inside the furnace, fill it in from the backside, too. Because you don’t want those hot spots to grow and cause problems. You don’t want them to get to the hardware.

Then you may have a module where the hardware gets too hot in the backside and the module ends up falling in. That’s one scenario. You can get out ahead of it by filling some of those gaps.

For a refractory on the hearth, too, if you don’t want to replace a hearth you can find a refractory contractor to come in and (if you have a big furnace) spray gunite over the hearth to fix any gaps or cracks.

Doug Glenn: That’s more for castable, though?

Mark Rhoa: Yeah. On the fiber side of things, you’re looking for hot spots.

Doug Glenn: The takeaway is to make sure you’re taking regular thermal imaging of your shell of the furnace. If you’re noticing some hot spots, it’s time to investigate.

Mark Rhoa: If you have a lot of furnaces, you can get a thermal imaging gun for a couple hundred bucks and really [keep an eye out].

An even bigger deal are the doors. It will blow your mind if you look at the temperatures on a fresh door seal versus an old one. Have a temperature gun to justify to your bosses. “Hey, we realigned this, and it is 150°F. This time last year it was 250°F–350°F degrees.” Common sense can tell you we’re losing more heat when it’s like that.

Concerns with Free Floating Fiber (30:20)

Doug Glenn: Can you address the concern that some furnace users have regarding free floating fiber, especially in furnaces where there’s high velocity airflow?

Mark Rhoa: Talking about the benefits of fiber versus brick and castable, one of the benefits of the hard refractory is it does better with high velocities. Patriot furnaces may have a fan in there. Typically, they’re not getting high enough where we need to worry. You can put coatings on the fiber or rigid dyes or things like that to harden them.

But from a health and safety perspective, anytime you’re working with fiber you want to make sure you’re wearing a mask. They have warning labels on them. It’s not like it was back in the day. I’m not allowed to say the “a” word [asbestos]. So there are not worries like that anymore, either. But refractory ceramic fiber still does have a warning label on it.

We do have body size soluble fiber. Alkaline earth silica (AES), non RCF fiber, a bunch of fancy names, are more prevalent in Europe because of their rules. California’s got a lot of rules, too….

But we do supply that as well. It doesn’t have any sort of warning labels on it.

Obviously, when you’re working with it, you want to wear a mask because dust in general isn’t good. But it’s naturally soluble for your body.

It’s not quite as strong. It can have more shrinkage at lower temperatures. But it’s best to talk with somebody and understand what the right product is to use. Things can be a little worse, but there is a slight move in the direction of body soluble fiber because there are no warning labels on it. But it’s not drastic.

Some of the similar concerns foundries have is with sand and airborne silica now. Technically, I guess going to the beach we’d have airborne silica, too. There’s justification to taking those precautions, but it’s certainly not all doom and gloom.

The ceramic fiber is essentially little glass beads, like a tadpole head and then there’s a fiber tail that interlocks.
Mark Rhoa

Doug Glenn: What I heard wasn’t so much a human safety issue. It was the use of ceramic blankets inside of an aluminum annealing furnace: If the fibers got airborne, they would come to rest on the coils and mess up the strip going through. And then you have contaminated coil or it’s marked.

Mark Rhoa: The issue with that is the shot on the fibers. The ceramic fiber is essentially little glass beads, like a tadpole head and then there’s a fiber tail that interlocks.

Fiber has come a long way. The shot content is way lower than it used to be. But it’s certainly a concern if that gets on a coil and then it goes through the rolling mill and you make a small dent in all the glass … yeah.

A lot of different things can be done for that. People put up cladding; people rigidize it to lock the fiber in.

There are definitely concerns for all the applications. Big aluminum homogenizing furnaces may have that. Traditional, smaller batch annealing furnaces may not.

It would be the same thing if a little piece of brick chipped off onto [indiscernible]. The worry with some of the fiber stuff is it’s obviously a lot smaller so you don’t get to see it.

Doug Glenn: It’s a lot more conducive. You can imagine the difference between a brick being hit with high velocity air and a fiber, you would just see the degradation of the fiber. A fiber ceramic blanket would go down quicker.

Induction at Chiz (35:20)

I have one other question for you about Chiz. Your company was one of our sponsors at our recent Heat Treat Boot Camp, and I was surprised when you had an induction coil on your table. If you don’t mind, address what it is Chiz is doing in the induction area?

Mark Rhoa: We were using the company down the road from us, Advanced Materials Science (AMS), to machine some of our fiber boards and bricks that were a little too complicated for what we had in-house at the time. They have some really good CNC equipment up there. The guy who owned AMS was looking to sell off that branch of his business. We had been one of his bigger clients, and we came to an agreement to it; it’s still out of the same building, same equipment, same guys that are doing all the good work.

We started getting in there and saw a lot of the induction heating equipment on the client list — a lot of those electrical plastics, high temperature plastics, electrical marinite and transite boards, which we got into a little bit in the Chiz Brothers world but didn’t fully dive into it because the temperatures are a little bit lower than what we’re dealing with on the ceramic fiber side of things.

It’s been really good for us. They’ve got great machining capabilities down there to machine some of these complex parts out of NEMA G10 and marinite and transite and all these terms that were relatively new to me when we bought them.

It’s really helped us at some of these trade shows because three types of furnace guys walk by: the gas-fired guy, he’s my best friend; the induction guy used to be like, “There’s not that much we can do with you.” Now, we can do a lot with them.

And then I’m still trying to figure out how I can be happy when the vacuum furnace guy walks by. That will be a different battle for a different day. I’m not trying to get into the graphite felt world. I probably just can’t be friends with everybody.

But it’s been good to get into the induction industry. It’s something that we’ve been growing over the last year or two because we hadn’t been engaged with people quite as much as we had.

Doug Glenn: Well, we’ll look for opportunities for you to be friends with the vacuum people. One thing I know from experience, Mark, you could be friends with anybody. I’m sure you can work it.

Mark Rhoa: I’ll try my best.

Doug Glenn: You’re doing good.

Thanks so much. I appreciate your time and appreciate you being here.

Mark Rhoa: Look forward to seeing you at the next event. For anyone watching, Heat Treat Boot Camp was great. Whether you’re a supplier or heat treater, it’s a good group of people bouncing ideas. It’s a crash course on a hundred different things in two days. I was there to sell stuff, but I learned stuff, too, which was an added bonus. I’d recommend it to anyone watching. It’s a good way to force yourself to get out of the office. I will definitely be back.

Attendees of the 2024 Heat Treat Boot Camp with the Heat Treat Today team

About The Guest

Mark Rhoa
Vice President
Chiz Bros
Eleanor Rhoa, daughter

In the heat treat industry, Mark handles Chiz Bros‘ relationships with various end-use customers as well as furnace manufacturers. Given the critical need for energy efficiency and uniform temperature throughout the heating process, Mark has been able to develop custom refractory and insulation solutions for customers to meet their complex needs. Through participation in the ASM’s Heat Treat Show, MTI’s Furnaces North America, Heat Treat Today’s Heat Treat Boot Camp, and IHEA’s Decarbonization SUMMIT, Mark has been supportive of the industry, but more importantly, has helped countless customers improve their thermal efficiency and profitability. Mark was recognized in Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 Class of 2021.

Contact Mark at mrhoajr@chizbros.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #117: How GM Started & Grew FNC for Brake Rotors

January 16, 2025 / AUTOMOTIVE HEAT TREAT TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, NITROCARBURIZING TECHNICAL CONTENT

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, host Doug Glenn converses with Mike Holly on his extensive experience in ferritic nitrocarburizing (FNC). Listen as they discuss Mike’s career at General Motors, where he implemented FNC to improve brake rotor performance. This episode delves into the technical aspects of FNC, its benefits such as enhanced wear and corrosion resistance, and its application beyond automotive, including military and industrial uses.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #117: How GM Started & Grew FNC for Brake Rotors

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction (00:36)

Doug Glenn: Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio.

I have the great privilege today of talking with Mike Holly who I think you’re going to find very fascinating; I know I have in the conversations we’ve had so far. We’re primarily going to talk about ferritic nitrocarburizing (FNC) because Mike has some great experience in that area. But first I want to welcome you, Mike, and give you an opportunity to tell us a bit about you and your work history.

Mike Holly: I’m currently retired but I am working as an engineering consultant on my own, primarily in the areas of heat treatment, casting, welding, coding, and plating. I specialize in automotive and heavy truck applications. As far as my education, I’m a graduate metallurgical engineer with a bachelor’s from Wayne State University in Detroit and a master’s from Purdue. I have 43 years of experience in the auto and heavy truck industry; 32 of those years were with General Motors who I retired from. I was assigned to the materials engineering group in Warren, Michigan, and I specialized in driveline, exhaust, steering, chassis structures, and brake applications, primarily metal applications.

Mike Holly, lead consultant for Mike Holly Metals LLC, on ferritic nitrocarburizing

FNC and Brake Rotors (02:30)

Doug Glenn: The topic that we want to focus on today is FNC. Although if you think of anything else that might be of interest to our thermal processing people, feel free to deviate. How did you get introduced to ferritic nitrocarburizing or case hardening in general?

Mike Holly: I’ve always been involved with heat treatment and case hardening as a metallurgical engineer working on heavy gearing applications. I’m very familiar with FNC and way back in the mid-2000s (about 2005), we were looking at our warranty. In brakes, we saw an opportunity to improve the performance of our brake rotor by reducing brake judder, or pedal pulsation, which caused a lot of customer dissatisfaction. It caused a lot of warranties, knowing that these vehicles would be brought in to be serviced.

We were aware of FNC being done on brake rotors. It had been tried, but brake rotors are a highly dimensional, critical part, and control of distortion is paramount. With prior efforts, that distortion was completely out of control. And that’s why it never went anywhere. So, another team member and myself at GM took it offline and worked out the details so we could FNC-finish machined rotors with no subsequent grinding.

And we were able to do that, working with a company in Detroit at the time called Kolene. We were working in salt, but later on we did change the process to gas. The learnings between salt and gas pretty much transferred completely. We issued some patents, both for the FNC process itself and as it applies to brakes and some subsequent processing to improve the corrosion resistance of the rotor. My name is not on the patent as my prior employer owns the rights.

Doug Glenn: That is often the case, right? If you’re working for somebody, it’s their patent and not yours. How many patents were you involved with?

Mike Holly: I believe the number is 14 different patents. Some relate to the process directly; some relate to the interaction and the selection between the brake rotor and the friction material. There are quite a few patents that my prior employer has on this process. The first application was in 2009 in the Cadillac DTS and the Buick Lucerne. That’s where the rotors were first used.

Success with FNC (05:36)

Doug Glenn: Backing up to 2005, what do you think had made the FNC unsuccessful up to that point?

Mike Holly: Control of the output: The FNC process that was being used produced almost a solid white layer and we could not get the stopping power out of the friction material. This has to do with the application of something called a transfer layer. We discovered that you need porosity to get the transfer layer down.

Also, orientation of the brake rotor in the process is important; the patents tell you in the specs to orient the parts vertically.

Doug Glenn: Are you talking about the orientation of the rotor in the furnace?

Ferritic nitrocarburizing is a case hardening heat treatment. We are actually making a composite material. It’s within the families of nitriding, carbonitriding and carburizing. These are all done at different temperatures, and they produce different case depths. But again, you are making a composite material.
Mike Holly

Mike Holly: Yes. So it wasn’t anything we invented.

To try to control distortion further, we stress relieved the castings. We took all the residual stresses out from the founding, or the casting, of the part prior to machining, and then put the parts through ferritic nitrocarburizing, fully machined, no other grinding necessary; doing so, we’re able to maintain the critical dimensions.

A brake rotor is a safety critical part, so there are a lot of steps and validations to get that implemented.

Doug Glenn: It sounds like before 2005, and correct me if I’m wrong on this one, Mike, they were FNCing unfinished parts? They were FNCing the rotors before they were machined?

Mike Holly: No, they were doing finished parts and discovered that the dimensions, but the lateral runout and the thickness were so out of control that they would have to go in and subsequently grind to get it back in the dimension. But the FNC case depth is only 10 to 20 microns. You may wind up just grinding the case right off!

What Is FNC? (08:38)

Finish machining FNCed parts really can’t be done without removing the FNC, and then you lose the benefit. It’s a difficult matter to heat treat finished machined parts. It is done. But it was control of dimensions that made the difference.

Doug Glenn: Let’s take a step back then. I want to talk some very basics. You can give us a little metallurgy lesson for people who might not know what FNC is. Can you tell us about what we are doing in this process?

Mike Holly: Ferritic nitrocarburizing is a case hardening heat treatment. We are actually making a composite material. It’s within the families of nitriding, carbonitriding and carburizing. These are all done at different temperatures, and they produce different case depths. But again, you are making a composite material.

FNC is a thermal chemical treatment. We diffuse carbon and nitrogen into the surface of the iron. This strengthens the iron and provides not only a wear-resistant case but corrosion resistance. That’s a peculiar advantage to FNC.

We can specify for steels, stainless steels, gray irons, nodular irons, a whole host of ferrous materials. FNC can be performed in a gaseous atmosphere, molten salt or even a fluidized bed. You involve two gases: a source of carbon, which could be carbon dioxide or natural gas, and a source of nitrogen, which is typically ammonia.

The process is done subcritical, which means below the critical temperature of like 723°C (1333°F) — it’s well below that. It’s performed at around 560°C to say 590°C (1040°F to 1090°F). It produces a very hard wear and corrosion-resistant case from 10 to 20 microns and thickness.

Screenshot from the ECM USA advertisement (embedded in the podcast video) highlighting the ferritic nitrocarburizing processing they provide

Benefits of FNC (10:35)

So, what are the benefits? Why would we even do this? For one thing, it’s done at such a low temperature that it’s a low distortion heat treatment; we’re not going through the transformation temperature.

Doug Glenn: For example, just for those who don’t know, like carburizing — that means going above critical.

Mike Holly: That’s right. With FNC, we get an improved fatigue durability due to the higher surface strength. Ferritic nitrocarburized parts have a compressive residual stress on the surface, and that’s beneficial for fatigue. It’s resistant to adhesive and abrasive wear, it provides a fairly good surface finish, and, very importantly, it improves corrosion resistance compared to other processes.

And a critical environmental concern is there’s no hazardous waste treatment or landfill involved. These gases are readily available. There’s really no waste treatment that we have to concern ourselves with.

Why don’t we do every gear this way? It has to do with the case depth; these are very shallow cases. For heavily loaded parts like ring and pinion high point gearing, we need a thicker case to resist the rolling contact fatigue.

In that application we have to go to carburizing or carbonitriding. And for some shafts where we get very high bending stress, we have to use induction hardening, which is a case hardening treatment that doesn’t use diffusion. You’re just modifying the microstructure of the surface.

FNC has a unique niche: It’s subcritical, has good wear and corrosion resistance, and it improves the fatigue properties.

Doug Glenn: I want to ask you about other applications for FNC besides brake rotors.

First, let me ask you this since you’re talking about the shallow case depth. I’m thinking to myself, you’ve got the rotor and you’ve got your friction product (which we would consider to be the pads that are mounted to the caliper, let’s say on a car). Are those pads not also kind of grinding off the shallow case depth of the rotors?

Mike Holly: It could if you had an aggressive enough friction material. In one of the designs that we had to make was selection of friction materials. And at the time the non-asbestos organic friction materials worked very well with FNC.

But as we go up in aggressiveness, one of the projects I’m working on is improving the case wear resistance of the FNC brake rotors. We’re doing that by alloying gray iron with niobium. We alloy with niobium and form niobium carbides in the case. This greatly improves the wear resistance on the iron side. So that’s how we’re addressing the more aggressive friction materials that would typically be used in Europe.

Applications of FNC (14:51)

Doug Glenn: I want to come back to that niobium, too, so we’ll probably hit on that again. What other applications of FNC have you seen?

Mike Holly: It’s used where wear distortion and corrosion resistance are very important. Many lightly loaded gears will fit into this category. Struts, the devices that hold up your hoods, they’ll be FNC. Some locking mechanisms are FNC. Brake backing plates are currently done. And I think one of the biggest applications is clutch pack discs, which are small 1040, 1050 steel materials (that may not be the only alloy that’s used). They’re FNCed to improve the wear resistance in the case.

Why don’t we do every gear this way? It has to do with the case depth; these are very shallow cases. For heavily loaded parts like ring and pinion high point gearing, we need a thicker case to resist the rolling contact fatigue.
Mike Holly

An upcoming application I’m working on is chassis cradles and frames. We stamp these pieces out of steel, and we weld them. But when we weld them, the weld heat affected zones can lose strength. What we’ve come up with is by using a niobium alloy, a high strength, low alloy steel, and FNC heat treating it, all the weld heat affected zones have good fatigue performance, along with the rest above the cradle. That’s something I worked on at GM, and there’s a patent on that.

And brake rotors are the latest application which has benefited from FNC treatment. They provide very long-term durability, reduce brake judder, and they’re very commonly used for electric vehicles. Because of the regenerative cycle, there is not a lot of friction application. We have to be very concerned about corrosion buildup on an electric vehicle application.

Doug Glenn: When you start mentioning about car frames and things of that sort, have you gotten at all involved with this giga cast thing for Tesla? I mean is there any FNC going on there?

Mike Holly: Well, I’m not sure what Tesla is doing, but with chassis structures, you’re not only balancing strength. Strength is important; you’re also balancing stiffness. Stiffness could be related to the metal. Now steel has very high Young’s modulus value compared to aluminum. The way you have to make that up with aluminum is through section properties: Thickness and shape.

There’s always competition between steel and non-ferrous materials, whether it be cast aluminum or fabricated aluminum and steel. They each have their advantages, and there have been many vehicles made with both types of construction. Where stiffness is critical, typically steel dominates. That’s the story of chassis structures.

Doug Glenn: When we spoke before, I think you mentioned that there are some non-automotive applications for FNC like golf clubs and some other things?

Mike Holly: I have seen it performed at a company in Michigan where they’re doing, for example, very large gates that are used for hydroelectric plants. They’re FNCing the gate to improve its erosion resistance from water. It’s done in many military applications for devices that would hold onto ordinance. It can be used on stainless steels to improve their wear and strength. There are non-automotive applications for sure.

If you attend the Shot Show this month, January 2025, you’ll know that a lot of firearms are known to need FNC treatment. Learn more at https://shotshow.org/

FNC at General Motors (19:52)

Doug Glenn: I want to ask you a question about the business side of FNC. A lot of times there’s a lot of inertia to keep things the way they are, right? A lot of our advertisers have trouble breaking in with new technologies. From your perspective as one of the lead guys on this for GM, what did it take to get the FNC process into your production schedule?

Mike Holly: First, we had to prove that this is something that would benefit the client. The client would benefit twofold: The vehicles would resist distortion and corrosion; that would improve the performance of the brake in terms of resisting pedal pulsation.

Also, warranties can be very costly. Adding this type of enhancement reduces warranty costs. But you do have to balance the cost reduction of warranty versus the cost of the process. Initially it was very costly, but we wanted to see how it would perform in real time. And at game speed, which means in the customer’s hands.

There was a very willing group at GM, the Cadillac people, who wanted to be first. And they were willing to do this. It turned out quite well. And since that time, it’s been adopted by many car platforms including many competitors.

General Motors, the first to use FNC processed rotors on their pickup trucks and big SUVs, with Ford not far behind; in this Heat Treat Today article from April 2023, Michael Mouilleseaux reflects on the very commercial Mike Holly references in his interview: “I was shocked the first time I saw the commercial: a Silverado pickup truck, out in the snow, and the speaker saying, ‘We now have an 80,000-mile brake system because of a heat treating process called FNC!'” Read more at: https://www.heattreattoday.com/featured-news/how-tip-ups-forever-transformed-brake-rotor-manufacturing/

Doug Glenn: Do you have any idea what it was about the guys in the Cadillac DTS division that made it more attractive, more palatable to them than others?

Mike Holly: They wanted to be first. They wanted to offer a premium vehicle with premium performance. They advertised it in their brochures.

When it was adopted by the truck platforms, which was a really big deal in terms of volume, it was actually advertised on one of the Super Bowls early on. I still have that.

Doug Glenn: That would be very interesting to see a Super Bowl ad talking about brake rotors.

Mike Holly: Brakes and FNC. You know, the customer is king, and you have to provide something that they’re willing to go along with. Ultimately, we have to make money. Those were key characteristics.

Starting Out with FNC (23:26)

Doug Glenn: At that point did you just jump in full bore — buy the equipment and do it yourself? Or did you first start by doing some outsourcing of it?

Mike Holly: It was originally done in the existing supply base. We used existing heat treaters. The furnaces were not optimized for brake rotors; parts were being shipped a lot.

Before we started purchasing equipment, we wanted to make sure this was going to operate in real time at game speed as we expected. As the platforms were added, it was very clear from the beginning (and we know this from highly machined gearing) that the best thing is to have the heat treat shop right in the manufacturing facility. That way you’re not shipping these very dimensionally critical parts all over the place. And the dunnage is expensive.

Today the FNC operations are co-located for the most part with the machining plant. And in many cases, you’ll see the foundry, the machining plant and FNC all in the same locale. This eliminates shipping and transferring costs, maintaining your highly machined parts and eliminating the handling. These are heavy parts, and the furnaces have to be designed to accept the thermodynamic load of large parts. And it’s preferred to do it by the ton — a lot of parts at once. And these are batch processes, so they’re very receptive to that.

Part Fixturing (25:23)

Doug Glenn: Earlier you mentioned the criticalness of fixturing. Is there anything more you can say about that? We don’t want to disclose any secrets.

Mike Holly: Generally, our patents will just say vertical orientation. The heat treat suppliers all have different furnaces, so that’s for them. They design their own racking, and that’s their property. They don’t have to disclose that.

The OEMs just require dimensional control. So, show us statistically that your lateral runout, your thickness and your wheel mount surface meet our specs. And, of course, the guidance that the parts should be oriented vertically and should be stress relieved before machining is out there.

As far as the intimate details of the rack and how heavily loaded the furnace is, that’s all their efficiencies, and they own that. I don’t reveal that to anybody. That’s theirs. It’s not for me to cross fertilize the industry with that.

Early Players in FNC (26:49)

Doug Glenn: For posterity’s sake, it would be nice to know who some of the early players were in this. Obviously, your DTS Cadillac division were kind of the end users. But who were the people outside of GM who helped out?

Mike Holly: I’ll give some credit here: I mentioned Kolene. I think they’re out of the salt bath business now. The original salt bath heat treater was KC Jones in Hazel Park, Michigan, and then the gas processing was basically first implemented at Woodworth in Detroit.

Doug Glenn: I’m familiar with them, and I think they’re still doing it, right? From what I understand, Woodworth’s got a huge business in that.

Mike Holly: They are still doing it. They’re a very dominant player, but other players have entered the market and been very successful. It can be done. And from the OEMs perspective, competition is great.

I was involved in developing processors not only in North America, but in Asia and South America.

Doug Glenn: Were there are a lot of hoops to jump through for the folks at Woodworth or Kolene, for example? Do you have any tips or suggestions for companies who are wanting to supply stuff like that to GM?

Mike Holly: Initially there were a lot of lessons learned. We were able to work through that — mainly to get the scrap rate down. Now it’s down to very low levels. There’s continual learnings like stress relief, for example. It’s since been discovered that not all brake rotors need to be stress relieved. Depending on the geometry of the rotor, they may not develop a lot of residual stresses in the casting operation. Or the casting operations could be different if you have, say, a vertical part line with very long shakeout, the cooling rate is rather slow. We’ll develop minimal residual stresses that you may not have to stress relief. But at the end of the day, the dimensions must be met, and 100% of these parts are typically checked for dimensions.

The latest change occurring that’s driving new ideas is the Euro 7 regulation, the dust emission.
Mike Holly

FNC and New Technologies (29:39)

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump back to the process a little bit. This may have to do with some technology moving forward. But is there any alternative to FNC at this point? Any competitive processes?

Mike Holly: The latest change occurring that’s driving new ideas is the Euro 7 regulation, the dust emission. And I can describe that if you’re interested in a very short description.

They’re basically new rules from the European Commission. They’re intended to provide cleaner vehicles in terms of emissions and air quality. The latest implementation date appears to be 2026. They have a rollout date of when you have to meet the requirements. And it is particularly focused on brakes and tire-related emissions.

This is according to the SAE; I’ll give them credit where credit is due. They basically tell us that with Euro 7, brake particle emissions (size in the PM10 range; inhalable particulate around ten microns and smaller like dust and pollen and 2.5 microns) must reduce by 25% to 30% to a maximum of, say, seven milligrams per kilometer.

It’s a very complicated regulation. I think the latest data I’ve seen is 20, 35, but even if it’s 2035, we have to start working on that today.

The two technologies that I think are going to come to the forefront is going to be FNC and laser cladding, which you may have seen coming out of Europe. In laser cladding, we’re going to clad the brake rotor, the thermal spraying type of application with a very hard wear-resistant layer of titanium carbide. That will require post-grinding.

What I’m working on is FNC and enhancing the case properties by alloying the iron with niobium. Now, is this an entirely new idea? I don’t think so. Most metallurgists will tell you that even in carbides and grades we use different steels to improve either the case or core properties. Alloying additions are well-known in the heat treat industry. I’m boosting the hardness of the FNC case with niobium carbides. It also benefits the core by improving the strength of the core.

I think those are the two technologies involved.

I think niobium plus FNC is certainly the low-cost approach. Will it be compatible with all friction materials? In the most aggressive friction materials out there, you might have to go to laser cladding. But I think for the majority of friction materials, FNC on its own or FNC plus niobium will work, and they’re very low-cost type additions. Niobium alloying with cast iron is very well-known, and it’s been done in the past. It doesn’t require a lot of capital investment. If you already have FNC-heat treated rotors, you don’t have to buy furnaces. In my opinion, it is the low-cost option to accomplish the objective of meeting Euro 7.

Doug Glenn: I want to go back to that process of niobium a little bit just to be clear. The niobium is alloyed into the rotor to start with, right?

Mike Holly: That’s correct.

Doug Glenn and Mike Holly discussing laser cladding, grinding, and carbides in FNC

Doug Glenn: You’re not infusing it with….?

Mike Holly: No.

Doug Glenn: Ok, you’ve got the niobium and the carbides in the rotor to start with, and you’re just FNCing it as usual.

Mike Holly: It’s an alloy furnace addition at the foundry. It has been done in either electric or cupola melting. There is a heavy truck rotor application that was niobium alloyed for many years, and that was advertised as a 1 million-mile rotor. It had a very high niobium addition, so it affected the machinability of the part.

In the heavy truck industry, it’s all about uptime — keeping the trucks out of the shop and on the road. It accomplished the client’s objective.

Doug Glenn: You mentioned advertising again. I’ve got to go back and find this DTS advertisement on the Super Bowl.

Mike Holly: I think it was a truck application, Silverado Sierra.

Doug Glenn: I’ve got to find that.

The cladding process, if we’re talking about which one of these processes might win out if there was competition between them, is the cladding process done piece by piece? How do they clad a rotor? In FNC you’re not doing it piece by piece.

Mike Holly: One at a time.

Doug Glenn: Do you think the cost element will be the deal-breaker there, besides the fact that you’re adding cladding and post-grinding?

Carbides that could be used in ferritic carburizing: niobium, titanium and tungsten

Mike Holly: Yes, those are very costly. But the most costly part of it is the materials. You have to put an adhesion layer down, that’s basically a 316-type stainless steel all done with laser type thermal spray application and then a second layer of the carbide.

There are a couple carbides that could be used; titanium carbide is the favorite now. Niobium carbide could be used. Tungsten carbide can be used, but that has some environmental effects; I think tungsten has fallen out of favor. 316 contains both nickel chromium and molybdenum. Nickel is traded on the London Metal Exchange. Your ability to control costs with nickel is minimal. Nickel and molybdenum, especially, is used in other applications such as high temperature alloys. So, you’re going to get competition from the turbine engine material.

In the case of FNC, ammonia, natural gas, carbon dioxide, and propane are all readily available worldwide. They are not controlled by any LME (London Metal Exchange) or anything like that.

Also, once you grind the surface, you have to deal with the grinding swarf. You cannot just put nickel to drain; that has to be treated. And, of course, you would like to recover it.

But I don’t want to throw the laser cladding people completely under the bus; it produces a very hard, wear-resistant layer.

Doug Glenn: It sounds like there may be applications where the cladding makes sense, but for your everyday truck and car you probably don’t need that high end rotor.

Mike Holly: I think we have to get back to basics. What does the brake do? It’s an energy conversion device. It’s converting mechanical energy to heat, or in the case of regenerative braking, it’s charging a battery. There’s the brake rotor, the metallic surface and the friction material. It has to be looked at as a system. What are the performance objectives that we intend to meet? And what is the desired durability and cost?

Doug Glenn: It seems like from what you’re describing FNC would have a huge cost advantage.

Mike Holly: I think so.

Current State of Brake Rotor Industry (39:05)

Doug Glenn: In your consulting work which you mentioned earlier, you’re working on improving the wear life of these rotors using FNC by incorporation of niobium?

Mike Holly: Yes. I published an SAE paper recently, and I’m going to publish another one in the upcoming North American colloquium and also in EuroBrake. My clients are sponsoring various tests and evaluations both here, in Europe and in South America. We’re getting a lot of good data, but competition makes us better. It truly does. You see it at these brake meetings. There’s always the cladding people, and there’s always the FNC people.

Doug Glenn: What is the leading brake event in the United States?

Mike Holly: In my opinion, it would be the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Brake Colloquium. But there’s also the regular SAE congress. In Europe, it would be EuroBrake. And I think there’s comparable activities in Asia.

Doug Glenn: I just thought of a question I wanted to ask you before: You said Euro 7 is for brakes and tires, and they’re concerned about the particles created by both when they’re used — tire wear on the roads or brake friction?

Mike Holly: Yes. And they’re concerned about the microplastics from the tire. I think the tire people have a bigger job than the brake people do. But brakes are a fairly significant challenge.

Doug Glenn: I’m laughing because I’m thinking it depends how you drive. Some people are a little heavier on the brakes than others.

Are you fairly confident that Euro 7 will come to the U.S. at some point?

Mike Holly: I’m not a regulations expert, but I think it likely will. It’s more of a political question. I understand from talking to some contacts in Asia that they plan on adopting it. We’ll see; it’s definitely going to add cost.

Doug Glenn: Yes, most regulations do.

Final Thoughts (42:18)

Doug Glenn: Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap up?

Mike Holly: I not only work on brakes; I’ve also worked in suspension springs. Some of those are microalloyed to improve their properties. I can do CQI-9 audits. I’ve worked on coatings and platings (hard chrome or electroless nickel). If someone would need an extra hand, I get to help out.

Doug Glenn: You’ve got my vote. When did you retire from GM?

Mike Holly: I retired in 2021, and I currently live near Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Doug Glenn: And you’ve built your own consultancy, which is great. Thanks for taking the time to visit with us. I appreciate your expertise.

Mike Holly: Thank you.

About The Guest

Mike Holly
Consultant
Mike Holly Metals LLC

Mike is currently a consultant with Mike Holly Metals LLC, specializing in heat treatment, coating, casting, metal forming and joining operations. He has 42 years of experience in industry, including 32 years at the General Motors Materials Engineering department where he was assigned to support automotive and truck chassis applications. He holds 15 patents and was key in the development of Ferritic Nitrocarburizing Brake Rotors. Mike has a Bachelor of Science in Metallurgical Engineering from Wayne State University and a Masters from Purdue University.

Contact Mike at mike.holly72@att.net.

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Heat Treat Radio #117: How GM Started & Grew FNC for Brake Rotors Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #116: Basic Practices for Successful Leak Detection

December 19, 2024 / HEAT TREAT RADIO, Manufacturing Heat Treat Technical Content, VACUUM PUMPS GAUGES VALVES TECHNICAL CONTENT

In this Heat Treat Radio episode, Dave Deiwert, a seasoned expert in leak detection, shares key steps to locate leaks in a vacuum furnace. Host Doug Glenn and his guest specifically look at helium as a tracer gas. From Dave’s extensive experience starting as a field service engineer to founding his own company, Tracer Gas Technologies, listen as he identifies systematic approaches, the influence of air currents, and cost-effective strategies for effective leak detection.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #116: Best Practices for Successful Leak Detection

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Meet Dave Deiwert (01:10)

Doug Glenn: Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio. We’re talking today about leak detection in vacuum, and we’re happy to have Dave Deiwert with us who is a leak detection expert.

Dave, would you give our listeners a little bit of background about you and your qualifications in the industry, and then we’ll jump into some questions about leak detection?

Dave Deiwert: I’ve been in leak detection since 1989. I started off my career as a field service engineer. I did that for about 10 years, then moved into sales engineering for probably the second third of my career. And for the last number of years, I’ve been a product manager and applications manager, working with several of the major vacuum and leak detection companies in the world. I thoroughly enjoy what I do and helping others with their leak testing applications.

Doug Glenn: And now you’ve got your own company. Could we hear a bit about that?

Dave Deiwert: Sure, Tracer Gas Technologies had its birth in September of this year. My focus will be on providing training and applications assistance to industrial clients, research and development labs, and government and university labs.

Doug Glenn: What’s the best way for people to reach you?

Doug Glenn and Dave Deiwert discuss his new position as president of Tracer Gas Technologies.

Dave Deiwert: We are new and still working on the website, but in the meantime, you can reach me at my phone at (765) 685-3360 or email me at DDeiwert@gmail.com.

Doug Glenn: Dave recently published an article in the November 2024 print issue of Heat Treat Today called, “Basics of Vacuum Furnace Leak Detection, Part One.” The article includes ten tips for vacuum leak detection using a helium leak detector.

Indicators of Leaks (03:45)

We’re going to cover some of those tips today. But before we get started, what are the most common symptoms that we have a leak when operating a vacuum furnace?

Dave Deiwert: I’ve been helping these clients for a number of years. And typically, one or two things happen: So, the client is following the furnace manufacturer’s recommendations to do a periodic “leak up test,” where they pump the furnace down towards base vacuum; they isolate the pumps to look for the pressure to rise after the pump’s been isolated, and if the pressure rises at a faster rate over a test period of time, which might be ten minutes, then they determine they have a leak that they should be looking for.

It’s either during that test that they discover they have a leak that they should be looking for before it impacts quality. Or the problem develops while they’re using the furnace, and it begins to affect the quality of the product. They start to see a difference in the appearance of the product because there’s some type of contaminant gas from atmosphere, water vapor, or maybe their product is sensitive to oxygen and such. It also could be as simple as they used to pump down to base pressure for the process in “x” amount of time, and it seems like it’s taking longer.

One of those two things will get their attention, and that’s okay. Let’s look for the leaks.

Isolating the Source of the Leak (05:11)

Doug Glenn: Most of the discussion we’re going to have today is going to be on using helium leak detectors. But let’s assume you don’t have a helium leak detector. What would be your checklist of things to run through to try to isolate the source of the leak?

Dave Deiwert: My perception is that end users that only have maybe one or two furnaces might not have their own leak detector, and calling for help might be quite a pricey option. They may try to do some things on their own without the leak detector or help from somebody outside the organization.

The first thing you’re going to do is consider where most leaks typically would be on a furnace. You’re going to think of things like the door is opened and closed on every cycle of the furnace, so the gasket or O-ring type material there can get worn over time.

Or maybe while the door was open, something came to rest on the O-ring: a piece of fuzz, hair, or slag metal. Something may be there that creates a leak path when they close the door. To look at that in greater detail, they get some extra light on it and see if they can determine something there. They may go ahead and remove that O-ring and just clean it up really well. Many might put a light coating with some vacuum grease or some type on it and then reinstall it.

Of course, we recommend that you try not to use vacuum grease. That could be a whole other discussion. But many will try that and see if it’s helpful to them.

The vent valve for the system also opens up after every test. So, there’s another gasket that can get worn or dirty.

Another thing would be process gases. If they filled their furnace with some back stream with argon or something, those process gas valves can leak past the seal.

So they think about each of these things and go through them one at a time and inspect them. And if they’re not quite sure what they’re seeing, they might replace the gasket or seal and then hope that they’re successful. And if they continue to not be successful, they ultimately end up calling for help.

Somebody could get very frustrated looking for leaks if you don’t know for sure that it’s only picking up helium. It’s not reacting to Dave Deiwert’s aftershave or cologne, or something else… the fork truck that went by, or something else. I can say with 100% certainty it’s reacting to helium.

Understanding Leak Detector Technology (07:14)

Doug Glenn: I want to ask for a further explanation on the first tip in this article.You say, “Understand how your leak detector works to the point that you can confirm it is working properly.” How does a company do that?

Dave Deiwert: If you’re going to go to the expense of having a leak detector — which many should — they should understand how it works properly and how to tell that it’s working properly or not before you start spraying helium to look for leaks.

Every manufacturer of leak detectors today, and for quite a number of years, has a leak detector that will let you know whether you’re in the test mode or in a standby mode. If you ever approach somebody that is leak testing and the leak detector is in standby mode and they’re spraying helium, you can suggest, “I bet you haven’t found any leaks yet, have you? Well then, you might want to put your leak detector in test mode.”

Understanding it’s in test mode and understanding how to calibrate the leak detector are good tools to help your success in finding leaks on the system. You have to at least be familiar enough with the leak detector to understand its operation and knowing that it’s sensitive to helium and the calibrating procedure increases and supports this understanding.

Doug Glenn: That makes a lot of sense: Make sure it’s turned on.

Dave Deiwert: Right, turned on and connected to your system. If you don’t have a hose going from the leak detector to the furnace and you’re spraying helium, that’s also going to be a problem.This might sound silly, but sometimes people think, “Hey, this sounds easy. You just spray helium and look for leaks.” They may ask some person who doesn’t really have much experience, “Hey, go over and test the furnace.” They may be embarrassed to say that they don’t know how to use the leak detector, so they may give it a go. Because they don’t understand the leak detector, they might not be successful.

Doug Glenn: That leads me to my next question because I would be that guy that doesn’t really know how they work. When you’re performing a leak detection using a helium leak detector, how does that process work? Where is the leak detector? Where are you spraying the helium?

Dave Deiwert: Sure. In my career I’ve seen people choose a few different points of connection to the furnace, but you’ll find our industry that we teach people that the best place would be to connect the hose from the leak detector to point in front of the blower if they’ve got a blower on their system. If they don’t have one, it’s going to go at a connection point near the inlet of the pump of gas pumping through this system. But you want to sample that flow of gases from the furnace towards the pumps. That way, you can get a sample to the leak detector as you’re spraying the helium.

When you talk about how the leak detectors work… at every class I teach, I think it’s important to at least give enough information so that you have confidence that the leak detector can help you. How’s it sensitive to helium and why? With these leak detectors, no matter who manufactures them, typically you’ll see that inside there’s a mass spectrometer that’s tuned to the gas mass weight of a helium molecule. And because it’s dependent on the mass weight of a helium molecule, not the mass weight of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, or whatever, you can be 100% sure that when the leak detector reacts, it’s getting helium from somewhere.

I stress that because somebody could get very frustrated looking for leaks if you don’t know for sure that it’s only picking up helium. It’s not reacting to Dave Deiwert’s aftershave or cologne, or something else… the fork truck that went by, or something else. I can say with 100% certainty it’s reacting to helium.

You might be surprised how often in my career somebody said, “Dave, the leak detector’s reacting, and I haven’t even started spraying helium yet.” I will tell them helium is coming from somewhere, and it could be the tank of helium that you’ve rolled up to the furnace is spraying helium and you didn’t realize it. Maybe the spray gun is still spraying helium even though the trigger is not pulled. Maybe the regulator’s leaking.

Leak detector hooked up to vacuum furnace
Source: Dave Deiwert

And if that furnace has got a leak, it’s the whole reason you brought the leak detector over. You’re not spraying helium yet, but helium is being sprayed by the tank or the regulator. The leak detector is going to react to the helium regardless of how it got into the system. So that can be very frustrating.

Let me back up: If you know beyond the shadow of a doubt the leak detector will only respond to helium and you haven’t sprayed helium yet, you know immediately it’s coming from somewhere.That is to say, I need to figure out what’s going on there. Otherwise I might spin my wheels looking for a leak while something else is a distraction for me.

Does that make sense?

Understanding Helium (11:53)

Doug Glenn: Yes, it does. Let me ask you this, though, because I’ve never done a helium leak detection as a publisher of a magazine — we don’t have a lot of helium in this business. You’ve got this box called the helium leak detector. It’s got a hose. You connect the hose near the blower or someplace close to the vacuum pump. I assume the leak detector is sampling the air as it’s coming towards the pump or towards the blower. Correct?

Dave Deiwert: Absolutely.

Doug Glenn: Then you’re spraying helium on the outside of the furnace somewhere to see if it’s being pulled into the furnace through some hole and therefore heading towards the pump. Correct?

Dave Deiwert: Yes.

Doug Glenn: I wasn’t ever sure how that worked — whether you spray the helium inside the furnace then you’re checking around the outside of the furnace with the leak detector; I know that sounds silly, but I thought that might be how it worked. But the truth is you’re sampling the air inside, and you’re spraying helium on the outside. If that’s the case, with a canister of helium on the outside of the furnace, won’t the detector be detecting the gas because it is going from that helium canister through and into the furnace, right?

Dave Deiwert: Yes, that’s correct.

When we get into the idea of spraying helium — where does the helium go when I spray it? When I started my career way back in 1989 as a field service engineer, I was taught that helium rises because it’s the lightest gas. And so I was taught, as were many other people, to start at the top of the furnace and work your way down.

The problem with teaching that is (remember, there’s five parts per million of helium naturally in the air we breathe) that if I start spraying helium, I can tell you with 100% confidence that the air currents in the room are going to impact that helium. If you can feel the air blowing from your right towards your left, and when someone’s got a floor fan on you can be sure of it, the predominant helium you’re spraying is going to move that way. It’s going to dissipate over time, but starting somewhere methodical to spray the helium is important and to not spray too much.

Be Patient with Leak Detection! (13:14)

Doug Glenn: I did want to ask a little bit about that because in your second and third tip in this article you expressed the need to be patient when doing a leak detection. Just exactly how patient do we need to be, and why do we need to be so patient?

Dave Deiwert: Frequently throughout my career, I’ve run into people who say, “I’m not sure if I’ve got a leak, so I’m going to spray a lot of helium so I can determine it pretty quickly.” But if you spray that helium like you’re trying to dust off the equipment, you will have so much helium in the air the leak detector will definitely react if there’s a leak. However, now you have to wait forever and a day; it could be quite a while until the helium that you just sprayed all over the system and in the room dissipates before you can continue looking for a leak.

I always ask this question when I’m teaching a class with people who have been doing leak testing: “How do you set your helium spray nozzle?” The ones that’ve been doing it for quite a while will say that they’ll get a glass of water, for example, and they’ll put the spray nozzle down in the water and adjust the flow to where they get one bubble every two to three seconds. I see some variation on that, one to ten seconds. But they’ll try to meter it down. Somebody might say, “I’ll put the nozzle up to my lip and spray so I can barely feel it.”

I’ve run into people who say, “I’m not sure if I’ve got a leak, so I’m going to spray a lot of helium so I can determine it pretty quickly.” But if you spray that helium like you’re trying to dust off the equipment, you will have so much helium in the air the leak detector will definitely react if there’s a leak. However, now you have to wait forever and a day.

To those people, I’ll say, “That’s a good start. If you put that nozzle in that glass of water and it looks like a Ken and Barbie jacuzzi, you’re spending way too much helium into that.” I would meter that down to a very small amount, whether it’s a bubble every three seconds or you can barely feel it on your lip is a good place to start.

And because I made the comment that helium doesn’t necessarily rise but can go different directions based on the wind, air currents in the room, and fresh air makeup, eventually somebody says, “Where should I start?” I’ll say, “I don’t have a problem with you starting at the top of the furnace and working your way down. Be methodical.”

Some people will start at the leak detector they just hooked up because they might have put a leak in the bellows connection from the leak detector. You might start there to make sure the assembly you just did is leak tight.

But start somewhere, be methodical as you move across the system, and remember that helium can go up, down, left, back, or forward depending on what the air currents are.

Doug Glenn: I was actually going to ask you about the air currents, because I thought that was an interesting tip that you had made. In fact, I think that’s like tip four and five in this article. I think we’re dealing with air currents and things of that sort. So, we’ll skip over that, because I think you’veaddressed that.

The Dead Stick Method (16:48)

Doug Glenn: You mention an interesting thing called a “dead stick method” in tip number six. Can you explain what that is?

Dave Deiwert: I’m glad you asked that because I looked back on that later and thought I don’t think I elaborated on that enough for somebody that’s never done the dead stick method. That is a term for when you spray just a little squirt of helium away from you and the furnace, and then stop spraying. Then you’re going to rely on the residual helium that’s coming out of the tip of the nozzle for some period of time.

In my training classes, I typically have a plastic bottle that has a little right-angle nozzle on it. You may have used them back in high school in chemistry; it might have had alcohol in it. I will squirt a little helium in that plastic bottle and then screw the cap on; that will last me for two or three days at a trade show or a training event. I don’t have to squeeze the bottle. There’s enough helium coming out of the nozzle that you can detect leaks.

To demonstrate, I’ll put hair on an O-ring on a test for the leak detector. (It’s the cause of my receding hairline.) I can take that nozzle without squeezing the bottle and move it near the hair that I put in there, and it will detect it very impressively every single time, at least over the course of two to three days.

Perspective looking up into the world’s largest vacuum chamber at NASA’s facility in Sandusky, Ohio
Source: Dave Deiwert

My point of demoing that is people tend to spray away too much helium. If there’s five parts per million naturally in the air we breathe, you only need enough delta difference so that as you go past where the leak’s at you can see a reaction from the leak detector and pinpoint it.

Backtrack to if somebody sprays a lot of helium to prove they have a leak. Now they have to wait a long time for the helium to dissipate. And by the way it’s not just dissipating from the room. You’ve sprayed a lot of helium that is now feeding that leak. And as it goes through the leak path in the furnace, it expands back out in front of you. It’s got to pump away from the furnace, too. It’s also got to clear the system and go out to the pumps before you get back to baseline so that you can continue leak checking.

Therefore, if you spray just very small amounts,, you have to get close to where the leak is before you start to get a response. This way you have less concern of helium drifting to the opposite side of the furnace and going through a leak path there — that can really distract. You may think you’re near the leak, but it’s really on the other side of the furnace because you’ve sprayed way too much helium.

Spraying little amounts might make you feel like it’s taking longer. But the fact is, when you start to get a reaction at the leak detector, you can be comfortable that you’re getting close to the where the leak is.

Doug Glenn: If you know you’re in a room with air currents in it (let’s just say there’s a flow of some sort from left to right), does it make sense to always start downwind, and then work your way back across the system?

Dave Deiwert: Yes. If I can feel a fan — Joe’s got his fan on because it’s keeping him cool, and it’s blowing over towards where I’m leak testing, I might say, “Hey Joe, could you turn your fan off a little bit while I’m testing?” He may say, “No, it’s making me comfortable.” All right, now I’ve got to work with that. I know that I can feel the air currents moving from my right towards my left. So, yes, starting downwind and working my way up could be helpful. You want to pay attention to what the air is doing if you can tell. It may be a very calm environment, and you’re not sure what the air currents are doing; just be methodical. Pick somewhere to start in the furnace.

Here’s something else about spraying helium: Once you think you know where the leak is at, every time you put the spray nozzle there you should get the same response. You spray the helium, you get a response, you stop spraying and wait until it drops back to baseline, and then you go back to where you think the leak is. If that’s where the leak is, every time you put the probe there, you should get the same response time at the leak detector. If even one time you put the spray gun there and don’t get a response or not nearly the same, then that’s not where the leak is at. Yeah, you should know beyond a shadow of a doubt when you pinpoint the leak.

Doug Glenn: How often do you see more than one leak at a time? Let’s say you isolate a leak, you think you got it, then say you take the gasket off or whatever you do, do the test again, and there’s still a leak.How often does that happen?

Dave Deiwert: It happens most of the time. When I was a field service engineer and somebody called me in to help, I almost never found one leak. That tells me they were working with one leak that maybe wasn’t large enough to affect their quality or the cycle time, and they were living with it. And the day comes where they have a leak that gets their attention or the leak got larger. It can be more challenging if you’ve got more than one leak. It’s a short-lived celebration when you think you found a leak and then you go to start the process, and, oh, it looks like you still have a leak. That wasn’t the one. So, you might make a case for looking to see if you can pinpoint another leak while you’re in the leak testing mode.

Doug Glenn displays the cover of the November 2024 issue of Heat Treat Today, in which Dave Deiwert’s article, “Basics of Vacuum Furnace Leak Detection, Pt 1,” is featured.

Saving on Helium Gas (21:35)

Doug Glenn: Besides the fact that a helium leak detector can save you all kinds of time because typically you can find a leak faster with a helium leak detector then in a process of elimination, you also mentioned a tip for saving money regarding the mixing of the gas. Could you elaborate on that and any other cost savings tips?

Dave Deiwert: I already mentioned that people tend to spray way too much helium at least until they’re sensitive to that concern and cut back. But when they buy the tanks of helium, they’re buying 100% helium. And remember my comment that you just need enough delta increase in the helium that you’re applying to where the leaks at to be able to pinpoint it. The possibility that you could buy your tanks of helium at a lesser percentage, maybe 25% helium and 75% nitrogen, would help you save on some helium and help your efforts to not be spraying too much.

People have not been saying that in this industry, and so that can make folks nervous. “I don’t know, Dave. We’ve never done that before. I’ve never heard anybody else say that before.” I suggest if you are going through a lot of helium, you could cut down how much helium you’re spraying. You could save some significant money, especially these larger facilities with many furnaces and so forth. Give it a try. Buy one tank of it with a mix gas and pick something that you’re comfortable trying, whether it be 25% or 50% helium and buy one bottle. And the next time you test your furnace and find a leak, then try to look at that leak with the lower percentage helium and prove to yourself whether using a lower percentage of helium is going to save you money.

Doug Glenn: You’re suggesting people get themselves comfortable with it, use their 100% until they find the leak, and then try the lower helium.

Dave Deiwert: When they show the proof to themselves, that they can still have the capability to find leaks like that, then they could save a little money. Plus, there’s the added benefit of not spraying so much helium and having to wait as long for the area to clear up before you can start spraying again to continue to pinpoint a leak.

Doug Glenn: And that would save you additional time. Dave, thank you very much. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Dave Deiwert: Only that if you know you’ve got a leak in the system — it failed the leak up test or quality or whatever, you sprayed it around the entire system, and you can’t find any leaks — then you’re probably looking at an internal leak most likely past the seat of a valve. Or maybe you’ve got a vent valve that’s leaking past the seat, but your plumbing to that vent valve maybe goes out of the building, so you don’t really have an easy access to spray helium past that.

For example, with an argon valve, you may need to disconnect the argon supply from that valve so you can get access to that side of the valve to spray helium to see if you can detect a leak past the seat of that valve.

Doug Glenn: Dave, thanks very much, I appreciate it. I’m sure we’ll be talking again. I know vacuum leak detection is an important thing.

About The Guest

Dave Deiwert
President
Tracer Gas Technologies

Dave Deiwert has over 35 years of technical experience in industrial leak detection gained from his time at Vacuum Instruments Corp., Agilent Vacuum Technologies (Varian Vacuum), Edwards Vacuum, and Pfeiffer Vacuum. He leverages this experience by providing leak detection and vacuum technology training and consulting services as the owner and president of Tracer Gas Technologies.

Contact Dave at ddeiwert@gmail.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #116: Basic Practices for Successful Leak Detection Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #115: Lunch & Learn: Decarbonization Part 2

November 21, 2024 / HARDENING TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO

In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, Doug Glenn and guest Michael Mouilleseaux, general manager at Erie Steel LTD, continue their discussion of case hardness, delving into the hardening ability of materials, focusing on case hardening and effective case depth. Michael explains the differences between total and effective case depth, the impact of core hardness, and the role of material chemistry. They also discuss practical applications for heat treaters, emphasizing the importance of understanding material properties.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #115: Lunch & Learn: Material Hardenability and Effective Case Depth

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

The Influence of Core Hardness on Effective Case Depth Measurement (01:03)

Doug Glenn: Today we are going to talk about a pretty interesting topic, and some interesting terminology, that has to do with hardness and hardenability of metals. For people who are not metallurgists, this may seem like a strange topic because isn’t all metal hard?

But we are going to talk more in depth about hardness of metal, hardenability of metal, and effective case depth. What we want to do is get a run down on the influence of core hardness on effective case depth measurements.

Michael Mouilleseaux: We are going to get a little bit into the weeds today on some things specific to metallurgy.

Those who are involved in high volume production carburizing know that consistency of results is extremely important. It is not just important in that we have the process centered in that the results are that way, but ultimately it has something to do with the dimensional control.

Specifically with gears, if the output from the process is not consistent, then one of the things that is going to suffer is going to be the dimensions. So, we’re going to be talking about effective case depths today.

Effective Case Depth vs. Total Case Depth (02:23)

Effective case depth is a little bit different from total case depth. Total case depth is the total depth that carbon is diffused into a part. That is very much a function of time and temperature. And there are some nuances with grain size and alloy content, but it is essentially a time and temperature phenomena.

Effective case depth vs total case depth (02:59)

Effective case depth is a little bit different. If we look at this graph, the x axis is the distance to the surface, and the y axis is hardness in Rockwell C.

If you look at the green line, this is a micro hardness traverse of a carburized part. It tells us many things. If you look at the left-hand side of the line at .005 in depth, the hardness there is 60 Rockwell C. Then it diminishes as we go further into the part: 0.010, 0.020, 0.040, 0.050.

We get to the end of that line, and we see that is the core strength. The core is a function of the material hardenability.

So, what is the effective case depth? If we look at the second vertical blue line on the right, it says “Total Visual Case.” So that’s exactly what that is. If we were to look at this part and etch it — I am presupposing that everybody understands that we would section the part — we would mount it, we would polish it, and then we would look at it in the microscope at 100x. Then, we would see a darkened area, which would be the total depth of carbon diffusion into the part. That is not a function of the material grade; there are some nuances there.

But the effective case depth is a measurement. And in North America’s SAE Standard J423, we say that we measure the case effective depth to Rockwell C 50. The surface hardness is 60, we measure the hardness in increments, and when we reach this hardness the depth that hardness achieves is 50 Rockwell. That is the effective case depth. If we look at the core hardness on that part, we can see that on this particular sample it is somewhere between 45 and 50.

Finding Material Hardenability (05:17)

What causes this core hardness? It has to do with the hardenability of the material.

Here we are looking at an SAE chart J1268. It is for H band material for 4320, a common gear material. This tells us a lot. It has the chemistry on it, below that it has some information for approximate diameters, and then it has, on the far right side of the diameters, we see specs for cooling in water or cooling in oil.

And between them there is the surface, the three-quarter radius, and the center. If we look at the surface of an oil quench at two inches, it has a distance from the surface of something like 4 or 5. So, if you go over the chart on the left-hand side, go to 4/16” or 5/16”, which has an HRC of 29 to 41. Even though this is a hardenability guaranteed material, for a two-inch round you would expect to have something between 29 and 41 for the surface hardness.

Now let’s look at what you would get at three-quarter radius in an oil quench. If you look at two inches, the Jominy position is [eight]. You can see that at three-quarter radius on a two-inch bar, that is an inch and three quarters, I believe, the hardness is going to be something between 23 and 34. In the center of that bar for a two-inch round, it is going to be J12, which has a hardness of 20 to 29.

That is the definition of hardenability. It is the depth that a material can be hardened. And it’s totally a function of chemistry. Davenport and Bain did the algorithms for this in the 1920s leading up to World War II.

Effect of Core Hardness (07:20)

If we are going to evaluate the effect of core hardness, we are going to look at parts that are heat treated in the same furnace to the same cycle in the same basket under all of the same conditions — the only thing different is going to be the hardenability of the material.

Go all the way down to number three on this “Methodology” slide. The anticipated total case is going to be about 0.040 for all of these samples.

This data graph has four samples on there. The red line is the measurement of Rockwell C 50. If we look at the highest hardenability sample, the blue sample has the highest core hardness and also the deepest effective case depth. And as the core hardness is reduced, you can see that where the line crosses the plane of Rockwell C 50, that is reduced as well.

Doug Glenn: Am I correct in thinking the yellow line here at the bottom has the lowest core hardness or hardenability?

Michael Mouilleseaux: Both. You’re correct.

Doug Glenn: That’s why it is crossing the red line much earlier than the others.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Yellow also has the lowest effective case depth.

If we look at this in a tabular form, this is the data, and what you looked at were the microhardness traverses, per the standard using an MT-90: the hardness was (the effective case depth was) measured to Rockwell C, the total case depth was determined visually on these things, and, you’re going to say, that Michael, you’ve got four different materials there. That is correct. We also have four different hardenabilities.

In answer to the question, if these were all the same heat, would we have these same results? We would with the exception of the bottom one at 1018. There is no way that we could take an alloy steel and reduce the hardenability of that amount.

Here is what we are talking about: We know that they were all run at the same process when we look at the total enrichment on this; it’s within the margin of error 0.038 to 0.042.

We look at the effective case depth, interestingly, we have quite a variation there. The first one has the highest core hardness at 46, and the effective case depth is 0.039. Second, we have a sample where the core hardness is 44, and the effective case depth is 0.036. Third, we have a sample where the core hardness is Rockwell C 39, and we have 0.029 effective case depth. And finally, there’s the 1018 sample that was put in there just as a reference. The core hardness on that was 24 with 0.015 effective case depth.

There is a direct proportion between the core hardness and the effective case depth that you are going to be able to achieve.

Referencing back to that hardenability chart that we looked at (the very bottom, half inch section quench in moderately agitated oil), it has a Jominy position of 3. If we look at J3 on the chart, we can see that at the lower end of the chemistry composition, we could have a core hardness as low as 35, and at the upper end of the chemistry composition we could have a core hardness as high as 45.

Let’s go back to the tabular data. That column for J3 is the data that was provided to us by our client from the steel mill.

When they melt a sheet of steel, it is a high value part. So, they use what is called SBQ (special bar quality). Special bar quality is subject to a lot of scrutiny and a lot of controls. One of the things provided, in addition to things like the chemistry and the internal cleanliness in the steel certification, is the hardenability of that specific heat.

You can see that the 8620, the first line, had a J3 of 44. We actually had a 46. The way to understand that is that when you’re going to melt 200 tons of steel, 100 tons of steel, or whatever amount it’s going to be, it’s not all done at one time in a single pour. It’s multiple pours out of a tundish.

The chemistry and the hardenability numbers that you got in a steel certification is going to be very close to an arithmetic average of what you would get when they test the first pours and the middle pours and the end pours. They’re going to average out.

Applying the Data (12:44)

When we’re using this data internally, we say we want to be plus or minus two points Rockwell C within the steel certified hardenability data. I can say that experientially over the years, Gerdau, SDI, Nucor (the domestic sources of SBQ bar )are very consistent in the way they make this stuff, and this is something that we can depend upon.

You could use this as a check for what you’re doing. If the steel that you have has a hardenability of 44 and if you’re not plus or minus two, you have to ask yourself why. There are only a couple of reasons that it would be outside those limits. If it’s above you, it probably is not the heat that it’s purported to be. If it is lower, it could either not be the heat that it’s purported to be, or there could be an issue with the heat treating.

As I said at the outset, we’re going to assume in this discussion that the reason that we have these numbers — the differential and core hardness — is not attributable to heat treating; it’s solely attributable to the chemical composition of the material or the hardenability.

We can use this information if we are an in-house or captive operation and are purchasing the material. We have an opportunity to define in our purchasing practice what the hardenability of the material is going to be.

As I mentioned before, the domestic sources are very consistent in the material that they produce. To produce a heat of 4320°F that has a J3 of 40 or 42 or 44, there is no cost penalty to that (in my experience involved in a major automotive supplier). It is a definition of what you want.

They are not making heats by randomly selecting chemistries for these heats and selling them. They make a recipe for a specific client. And my experience has been that they hold very true to that recipe.

If you are introducing a lot of variation into your process, not only is the output from that variable, but the cost of handling that is variable as well. A material such as this, to specify a J3 of 42 to 44, is something that is eminently doable. My experience is that the steel companies have been able to do that over time with a great amount of consistency.

Now, for those who are not involved in high volume production and do not have control of the source of the material, this chart remains usable. If someone is running a job shop or shorter term things who does not have furnace load sizes of parts, the key is to be able to mix and match things into specific processes. At least in carburizing, if we understand what the hardenability of the material is, then we have a much better opportunity of taking multiple parts and putting them into a load and determining ahead of time whether or not we are going to have consistent results.

Just one more thing that we would like to look at here is this next graph — the Caterpillar hardenability calculator. This is available from Caterpillar, and they readily share it with most all of their suppliers. I have been involved in numerous businesses and have never been refused this. You have to ask them for a copy of it.

SAE Chart J1268, which measures hardenability band for 4320 (05:47)

Michael Mouilleseaux: Using this calculator you import the chemistry of a heat, and then it automatically calculates the hardenability of that heat.

If you recall the J3 on the 4320 material that we looked at, the hardenability guaranteed it had a ten-point range. If you look at this particular heat, and this is what we call the open chemistry, this would not be a hardenability guaranteed material. The upper limit is higher than what you would see on a hardenability guaranteed material, and the lower limit is lower than what you would see. So the variation in a “Standard SAE J 48620” is going to be much wider – it will be much different.

If we look at that same J3 position, we are looking at 25 to 45, a 20-point swing in core hardness. If we go back and revisit the results we had, 39 to 46 with a seven-point swing, we had a 0.010 difference in effective case stuff. If we had a 20-point swing, you could imagine it is going to be significantly greater than that.

Two things, if you have the lower hardenability grade of material, it allows you to modify your process ahead of time to compensate for the fact that the core hardness is going to be lower in this part. Vice versa, if you have an extremely hot heat or it is high hardenability, similarly, you may be able to reduce some time and not put as much total case on the part in order to achieve what specified as effective case.

The hardenability charts are great guides in helping to establish a process and then to evaluate the consistency of that process.

One other comment about the chart is this is not a full-blown Lamont chart, which has various quench severities for different sizes. And that can be utilized to help pinpoint this. As you can see on the SAE chart, you essentially have two different quench rates. You have mild oil and water.

There are a lot of different types of quenchants that are available. The moderate quench rate that is on this chart very closely mimics what we at Erie have been able to achieve modified marquenching. Therefore, I’m able to use this chart without any offset.

Now, if you had a fast oil — petroleum-based oil is very fast — and a heat that had a J3 of 40 in which you are consistently seeing 44 out of it, then in your specific instance, your quenchant is more aggressive than what this chart was built to simulate. However, you can continue to use the chart. It’s just that you must use your experience in doing it.

So again: The strategy to control it is getting the hardenability data so that you can utilize that ahead of time — understanding what your specific heat treating operation is and, more specifically, what your quenching operation allows you to achieve.

Then, knowing that a typical section size of X in this furnace is going to give a Jominy position of Y, you can take that information and say over time, “If I have a variation here, it’s going to be an effective case depth. Is that variation attributable to the core hardness?” If it is, there is a strategy which will possibly change and tighten up the purchasing practice. If it is attributable to something else, then that gives good information to say, “There’s something in my heat treating process that I should be looking at that is attributable for this variation in case depth.”

Conclusion (22:14)

So, we waded into the weeds, and hopefully we have found our way out.

Doug Glenn: I think that explanation is going to be especially good for those who already know a little bit of metallurgy and know those charts.

Bethany Leone: Michael, for in-house heat treaters, how often do they need to be aware of the materials coming into their operations, testing it, or asking about changes that could be happening?

Michael Mouilleseaux: Hopefully this would give heat treaters worth their salt a reason to pause if they previously assumed the material does not come into play.

The next thing would be in high valued components — gears, shaft, power transmission, those kinds of things — heat lot control is typically mandated by the end user. If you have heat lot control and the unique data that goes with that, utilizing the strategy we just talked about is going to give you the ability of evaluating variation. If the primary source of variation is the material, that needs to be addressed. If the material is very consistent and yet you continue to have variation, there is obviously something in the heat treating process that needs to be addressed to reduce that variation.

Doug Glenn: Thanks for listening and thanks to Michael for presenting today. Appreciate your work, Michael.

About The Guest

Michael Mouilleseaux
General Manager at Erie Steel, Ltd.
Sourced from the author

Michael Mouilleseaux is general manager at Erie Steel LTD. Michael has been at Erie Steel in Toledo, OH, since 2006 with previous metallurgical experience at New Process Gear in Syracuse, NY, and as the Director of Technology in Marketing at FPM Heat Treating LLC in Elk Grove, IL. Having graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering, Michael has proved his expertise in the field of heat treat, co-presenting at the 2019 Heat Treat show and currently serving on the Board of Trustees at the Metal Treating Institute.

Contact Michael at mmouilleseaux@erie.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #115: Lunch & Learn: Decarbonization Part 2 Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #114: Decarbonization Demystified at IHEA’s SUMMIT

October 1, 2024 / HEAT TREAT NEWS, HEAT TREAT NEWS INDUSTRIES, HEAT TREAT RADIO

Listen as Jeff Rafter, vice president of sales and marketing at Selas Heat Technology and current IHEA president, discusses the upcoming IHEA Decarbonization SUMIMIT with Doug Glenn. Scheduled for October 28-30 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the summit will address the challenges and opportunities of decarbonization for manufacturers. Jeff highlights IHEA’s nearly 100-year history in industry education. The event will feature keynote speakers from the DOE, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and John Deere, with a mix of technical and business content aiming to provide practical strategies for energy management and sustainability. Learn more in this episode of Heat Treat Radio, and learn more about this episode sponsor, IHEA, and their event at summit.ihea.org.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #114: Decarbonization Demystified at IHEA’s SUMMIT

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

The IHEA Decarbonization Summit (01:03)

Doug Glenn: Jeff, when and where is the summit? And what was the driving force behind deciding to do this event?

Jeff Rafter: The IHEA Decarbonization SUMMIT will be at the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana, beginning on Monday, October 28, and ending Wednesday, October 30.

The drive to create this event arose because the IHEA membership had often commented on, and lamented, the frequent inquiries they get from the client base across all sectors of manufacturing; clients are looking for clarification on the ongoing changes of the U.S. energy infrastructure and, specifically, how to manage the requirement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

There is a lot that is changing quickly in the U.S. energy infrastructure around renewables, electrification, and low carbon fuels. he IHEA board felt that it was essential to assist manufacturing members by trying to clarify these topics in an interesting event that presented the information objectively and provided a diverse array of all the decarbonization pathways available to manufacturers today.

IHEA’s Qualifications (02:36)

Doug Glenn: For those who might not know what IHEA is, what makes it uniquely qualified to present such a summit?

Jeff Rafter: I am proud to say that IHEA is a very unique organization. Many trade organizations do not have the long-standing success in supporting members that this organization has. The composition of IHEA, which is close to 100 years old, was originally made up of heating appliance and heating component manufacturers, who have spent most of our history focused on industry education as a service to all the member companies.

We felt that this was the perfect organization to take up the topic of sustainability and decarbonization because we are education focused. From that background and that bias, we are leveraging thousands of years of experience over a broad array of manufacturing options from traditional fossil fuels through electrification. Our member companies provide a very strong basis to deliver real-world examples of how to deal with reducing CO₂ emissions.

Doug Glenn: And if I am remembering correctly, IHEA actually has a standing history of cooperation and working with the DOE on different things in the past, correct?

Jeff Rafter: Very good point, Doug. If you look back in history, before “CO₂ reduction” and “decarbonization” became buzzwords, we spent a lot of similar efforts working with government organizations, research laboratories, and third-party organizations around topics of NOx reduction and trying to create a cleaner basis of industrial, manufacturing, and energy. In addition, we have always spent our time helping with business concerns regarding efficiency, not only operating successfully heating processes and appliances, but also making manufacturing more cost effective.

Keynote Speakers (04:44)

Doug Glenn: And speaking of the DOE, I see that there are some pretty high-profile speakers coming. The keynote speaker is Dr. Avi Shultz, from the U.S. DOE, and he is on the Industrial Decarbonization Initiative. Other speakers include Paulomi Nandy from Oak Ridge National Lab, Jeff Kaman from John Deere, and Tim Hill from Nucor. Can you give us a sense of what these folks will be talking about?

Dr. Avi Shultz
Director
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
The Industrial Efficiency & Decarbonization Office (IEDO)

Jeff Rafter: Doug, we are very excited to have the diverse mix of speakers that will make up the summit presentations. With Dr. Schultz and Miss Nandy, we are very excited to be providing a third-party opinion — government organizations and research laboratories — and they will be presenting on their views of the trends for the future of sustainability and decarbonization.

When we move to some of the other presenters like Tim Hill from Nucor and Mr. Kaman from John Deere, we also wanted members and attendees to take away from the summit real-world experience. These are not imagined or planned changes. We wanted companies that had actual experience with decarbonization — who had even taken actions towards net-zero positions — to share with attendees exactly how they approached the challenges.

Because, of course, some of the issues around sustainability are that it comes at a cost.

And how do you fund that? How do you research that? Where do you look for grants, and how do you make the business case towards decarbonization or any sustainability action for that matter?

Finally, adding to those two bodies of participants, we have a number of presenters speaking about real-world solutions today. IHEA’s view on decarbonization and sustainability is that there is a very broad set of pathways that you can take today with inexpensive, readily available technologies all the way out to longer term solutions like full electrification of processes.

There is more than one way to approach this challenge and do the responsible thing in manufacturing, which is to address our CO₂ production globally.

Is Electrification the Only Answer? (07:25)

Doug Glenn: You mentioned electrification. When people hear decarbonization or sustainability, they often think electrification. There may be a lot of people listening saying, “I am primarily combustion. Should I be going?” Are only electrification solutions going to be presented? Or are combustion solutions going to be presented as well to help with the decarbonization?

Jeff Rafter: The answer to that question is, “Yes, you should be going, regardless of whether your focus and your background is in traditional fossil fuel combustion or electrification.”

The summit will contain a very balanced approach of different technologies, presented with no bias. The goal of this summit is providing education to help business leaders make better decisions around their energy management and their environmental concerns.

With that said, when we look at the body of what is available in the agenda, electrification is an important topic. But as a lot of people recognize, some portions of electrification are just relocating to a different fossil fuel further away from the point of use whilst other electrification options linked to renewable energy sources truly can come close to net-zero production of CO₂.

IHEA’s view is that there are many sustainability pathways that we can all investigate or pursue.

Some pathways maintain fossil fuel basis. Some industrial processes will be challenged to move to an electric heating source. And then for other processes, electrification is the cat’s meow. So it is that broad sweep of diverse technologies that everyone needs to be educated on to make better decisions when the time comes.

Who Should Attend the Summit? (09:21)

Doug Glenn: How technical will the summit be; do I need to know heavy engineering, metallurgy, and things of that sort? And who should come?

Jeff Rafter: Traditionally, a lot of IHEA’s educational content has been directed at a technical audience; it was technical education about how various energy sources and heating appliances work, how to comply to code, and how to approach the application of that equipment safely. In this particular summit, we have changed course a bit in that we did not want this event to be a technical conference.

The idea of this summit was to make it a business conference because that is where most of the challenges exist when we look at sustainability efforts.

The content that will be presented is a pleasant mix of some technical topics because we have to get a rudimentary understanding of how these different technologies work. However, we are spending just as much time in the presentations addressing business concerns: How do you fund these various actions? Where can you find available grants? What are real-world examples of how other companies have approached sustainability or have begun an initiative internally? How do you get the support and the decision-making decided while moving in the right direction? When you look at the agenda that will be posted on the IHEA website, you will see that the topics range broadly from some technology presentations to real-world business concerns and how to make those business decisions.

Agenda for IHEA Decarburization Summitt, Monday – Wednesday, October 28-30, 2024, in Indianapolis, Indiana

Doug Glenn: How much fun have you had putting this summit together?

Jeff Rafter: I would happily report it has been a tremendous team effort.

I am very proud to say that a lot of IHEA member companies and third parties have stepped up to help us construct this event. We are really looking forward to it being a valuable event that provides a lot of information and important takeaways for participants.

Doug Glenn: I know you have put a lot of work into it. I have watched you do this over the last year and a half, and you have done a great job coordinating it.

Closing Remarks (12:34)

Jeff Rafter: I would just like to say in closing, for anyone who is thinking about coming to the IHEA Decarbonization Summit, please do. This is a very important topic for manufacturers, and you really need to take the approach of not waiting. It is time to get in front of changes in our energy infrastructure and the need to decarbonize some manufacturing processes. This is a great way to get educated and start your plan.

Doug Glenn: And I did remember one other motivation: If you are looking to stay at the hotel where the summit is held, the cutoff date for the hotel (you can still get into the summit even if you do not hit this cutoff date) is October 7th. So anyhow, appreciate it. Jeff, thanks very much for your time.

About The Guest

Jeff Rafter
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Selas Heat Technology Company, LLC
Source: Selas Heat Technology

Jeff Rafter is vice president of sales and marketing for Selas Heat Technology in Streetsboro, Ohio, and has a rich history in the combustion industry, including Maxon Corporation. Jeff has 31 years of industrial experience in sales, research and development, and marketing; combustion application expertise in process heating, metals, refining, and power generation; and 13 years of service on NFPA 86 committee. He holds patents for ultra-low NOx burner design. Additionally, his company, Selas, is an IHEA member, and Jeff is the current president of IHEA as well as one of the driving forces/coordinators behind the upcoming Decarbonization Summit at the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis, October 28-30.

Contact Jeff at jrafter@selas.com .

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Heat Treat Radio #114: Decarbonization Demystified at IHEA’s SUMMIT Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #113: NIST and CMMC: What Heat Treaters Need To Know

September 19, 2024 / CYBERSECURITY, HEAT TREAT RADIO

Joe Coleman, cybersecurity officer at Bluestreak Compliance, discusses critical aspects of NIST 800-171 and CMMC with host Doug Glenn. Joe touches on how to become compliant, how long compliance takes, compliance pricing, and the limitations companies may face if not compliant. Learn more in this episode of Heat Treat Radio.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #113: NIST and CMMC: What Heat Treaters Need to Know

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

What Is CMMC? (03:34)

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump in. Cybersecurity, while it’s not unique to heat treaters, is across all manufacturing sectors. But there are some unique elements of it that tie into the metal treating industry.

Let’s start with some basic definitions for those who don’t know: What is CMMC and what’s the purpose of it?

Joe Coleman: CMMC stands for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. And we’re currently on version 2.0. It’s a verification program to ensure that defense contractors and subcontractors are able to protect sensitive information from the DoD (Department of Defense). That includes FCI, which is federal contract information, and CUI — or some people call it “coui” — which is Controlled Unclassified Information.

Cybersecurity acronyms “cheat sheet” available as a free download. Click on the image for a link.

It’s going to affect about 300,000 companies in the U.S. Also, it’s going to start impacting companies later this year or early next year. That’s when it’s said to be fully released, and they’ll start adding it to contracts and RFQs and things like that.

Doug Glenn: So, in CMMC 2.0 version, the DoD is asking companies, “Do you comply with CMMC 2.0?”

Joe Coleman: Rather, it is saying you must comply by 2025 and at a certain level; there are three levels.

Doug Glenn: What are these requirements based on?

Joe Coleman: DFARS 252.204-7012 was implemented in 2016. In it, they were saying that people must be NIST 800-171 compliant by December 2017. If you’re not, you’re way behind the ball. They just haven’t pushed it until recently. Now they’re really pushing it. It’s based on NIST 800-171 recommendations — that’s Rev 2, and a subset of NIST 800-172.

Doug Glenn: You mentioned DFARS. Can you just briefly explain that?

Joe Coleman: DFARS is Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement.

Doug Glenn: Also, I’m kind of curious about this: Who’s actually pushing it? Is it the Department of Defense, or is it government in general, or is it controlled by (kind of like Nadcap and things of that sort) an independent organization outside of the federal government?

Joe Coleman: No, CMMC does cover other things, but it’s mostly by the DoD. They are the ones pushing itbecause of foreign adversaries stealing our information and ransomware attacks and things like that.

Doug Glenn: Right, okay. So that’s CMMC 2.0. Is NIST 800-171 is a sub part of that, or is NIST 800-171 something different?

Joe Coleman: That’s something different. NIST 800-171 is published by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies. DoD doesn’t have a lot to do with NIST. They are two different standards; the DoD is just borrowing NIST 800-171 for CMMC’s requirements.

Doug Glenn: I see. They’re using NIST’s package that’s already there as part of their requirement.

I think you’ve already kind of hit on it, but let’s just be explicit about it. What started the push by the DoD to require CMMC or require any type of enhanced security?

Joe Coleman: The DoD finally realized just how vulnerable defense contractors are and how vulnerable their computer systems and networks are to cyberattacks and to sensitive information being leaked by the DoD or contractors, that kind of thing. They’re trying to pull everything together to improve national security and to help secure this important data.

Doug Glenn: So, in a sense, it’s really the DoD just trying to cover their rear end, so to speak, and protect sensitive, national defense type information.

What Is DFARS? (08:45)

We talked about DFARs briefly. I’ve heard a DFARS interim rule mentioned. What is that?

Joe Coleman: That came about in November of 2020. It plays along with the DFARS 7012 — 252.204-7012. They came up with three new clauses to improve how cybersecurity is handled and enforced.

The first one is clause 252.204-7019. It mandates that you when you do your assessment: you come up with an assessment score based on 110 controls, and your score can be from a positive 110 (the perfect score) to a negative 203. That score needs to be turned into the SPRS, the Supplier Performance Risk System, so other companies can see what your score is.

So, 7019 mandates that you do turn in your score and that it can be no older than three years old. They are requesting that if they say you’re DFARS-required on a contract, things like that, you need to be NIST 800-171 compliant.

The next one is 252.204-7020. And that one states that you have to give full access to your company — your internet system, your IT, all of your information, and your employees, if they decide to come in and do a medium or high assessment or just an audit. You will have to turn over that control to them.

Doug Glenn: Who is “them” in this case?

Joe Coleman: It would be a DoD official.

Doug Glenn: All right.

Levels of Assessment (10:59)

Joe Coleman: There are three different levels of assessments that can be done under NIST 800-171. There is a basic level which you attest yourself. It’s all self-attestation for NIST 800-171. There’s a medium level which means you have to have a DoD official come in and do your final assessment. And then there’s a high, which you also need a DoD official to come in and do that. The majority of them are basics, which you can self-attest to.

Doug Glenn: How does a company know if they need to even have the CMMC?

Joe Coleman: If your company is a defense contractor, subcontractor, vendor/supplier, or if you’re in the DIB (the defense industrial base), you will need to be compliant if you process, store, transmit, or handle FCI or CUI in any way. If you handle CUI or FCI, you must become CMMC certified at one level or another.

Doug Glenn: Let’s just take an example. Say I’m almost third tier down in a supply chain, and the guy I’m doing business for is obviously doing defense work. Do I need to be CMMC certified at that point, even on the basic level?

Joe Coleman: Well, it depends on what type of data you’re handling. There is a flow down process. It starts with the prime contractor. Then it goes to the contractor and then on down the line. And if you are dealing with CUI or FCI, you need to have that same certification level as your client or as your contractor.

Doug Glenn: Would my client in that case, the person I’m doing business with, would it be incumbent upon them to tell me that I am dealing with FCI or CUI?

Joe Coleman: Yes. It would be in your contract.

Doug Glenn: If someone listening has a specific question about whether they’re required, I’m sure they could contact you and you could probably help them on that just to make sure.

Joe Coleman: Anytime. I also have an ebook that I made that is ready to be sent out, so I can always send them a free copy of that.

Doug Glenn: Now, I think you’ve already answered this question, but how many maturity levels are in CMMC and what are they?

Joe Coleman: A little, there are three levels. There is level one, which is the foundational level, and that is for contractors or vendors or suppliers that deal with only FCI. They do not deal with CUI. So, there’s a much smaller set of requirements for level one. And about 60% of the 300,000 companies will be going for level one.

Then there’s level two, which is advanced, and that is for contractors and vendors and suppliers that deal with CUI in any way. It can come in an email and leave. But as long as they have access to CUI, they need to be at least a level two certification. And there are about 80,000 companies that are going to be impacted by that of the 300,000.

Level three is expert, and level three is based on the 110 controls in NIST 800-171 plus a subset of controls that are in 800-172. Level two mirrors NIST 800-171. It’s borrowing all the requirements from NIST 800-171, enhancing them a little bit, and putting them into CMMC. So, there are a few more hoops you have to jump through to be CMMC certified.

Doug Glenn: We’ve talked about two different sets of levels. We talked about a basic, medium, and high. And then we talked about level one, two, and three. Are these things the same or are they different? Can you help me understand the difference between those?

Joe Coleman: The basic, medium, and high is an assessment level that assesses your whole system and facility, and that’s based on NIST 800-171. CMMC, you have three different maturity levels, and that’s level one, level two, and level three.

Doug Glenn: When you say maturity levels, that shows the degree to which your company has gone to implement these things.

Joe Coleman: Yes. It is a certification.

On CMMC level one, you can self-attest your own certification. Level two and level three, you will have to have it’s called C3PAO (or a CMMC third-party assessment organization). They will have to come in and do your final assessment. Bluestreak Compliance can take you all the way to that assessment audit ready. But then you’ll have to have a C3PAO come in and do the final audit and the certification level.

Doug Glenn: That was going to be one of my questions because you guys mentioned that you’re a registered practitioner organization. You don’t actually do the assessments, but you can get everybody up to the door, right? You prepare them for it?

Joe Coleman: Yes. You would need a CMMC certified assessor to do that.

Doug Glenn: All right. And when is all this going to be required? Right now, it’s not required but it will be required?

CMMC: Mark Your Calendars! Companies will need to prepare for the eventual implementation of CMMC level two certification. A phased rollout is planned to simplify the process; however, a shortage of registered practitioner organizations (RPO) may lead to a backlog.

Joe Coleman: CMMC is not required currently. It’s in the last phase of being released for approval. Either late this year or early next year, it’s going to be a phased rollout. Later this year or early next year, you’re going to have phase one, which is that if you need to be level one certified, you will need to become certified right away. That’s the one you can self-attest.

Six months after that, they’re going to start requiring that CMMC level two is implemented. This means you’ll have to go through the process of getting a C3PAO. And that’s when it comes time to hire an RPO (registered practitioner organization), because they’ve got the training and the certification to get you there.

Now, one thing on the C3PAO: there are currently only 54 C3PAOs in the entire country. So, there’s going to be a huge backlog. You could be talking a year backlog, so plan accordingly.

Finally, at level three, an enhanced version of level two because it has more requirements, you’re also requiring a C3PAO for certification.

What’s Involved in Becoming NIST Compliant? (21:14)

Doug Glenn: Joe, let’s talk for a second about the process, if you will. What’s involved in becoming CMMC certified?

Joe Coleman: That all depends on if you are NIST 800-171 compliant already. If you are not NIST compliant already, you need to get NIST compliant as soon as possible. That has a big impact on your CMMC implementation.

Doug Glenn: Can you address that then: What do you have to do to become NIST compliant?

Joe Coleman: To become compliant, you have to do an assessment on your network and your facilities to come up with an assessment score. So, it’s the same as CMMC.

Then, you will have to do a gap analysis. You will come up with a POAM list (a plan of action and milestones); that is your to-do list based on your assessment, your shortcomings, or what you’re not compliant to. And you’ll need to come up with a system security plan (an SSP). That’s mandatory; you cannot be compliant without an SSP.

Once you get your SSP and your POAM list, then you need to take your score, your beginning score/baseline score, and submit that to the SPRS. And that is the library that holds all of the scores and shows your level.

From there, you start remediating and implementing your POAM list. But that also includes coming up with policies and procedures, plans, and a lot of documentation — everything gets documented based on where you stand and where you’re going, until the end when you do your final score.

Now, the SSP is a living document. It’s going to constantly change. If you have a change in your network, a major change, you’ll need to go in and update that right away.

How To Become CMMC Compliant? (23:46)

Doug Glenn: So that’s how you get to be NIST compliant. For CMMC, is there more to it?

Joe Coleman: There’s a few more requirements in CMMC, but the major difference is that with NIST 800-171 it’s all self-attestation. CMMC you will need to have a C3PAO.

Doug Glenn: That is, somebody’s going to need an outside validator, so to speak.

Joe Coleman: And they’re very expensive.

Now, another reason they came up with CMMC is because people were saying that they were compliant to NIST 800-171, and they really weren’t. That gets into the False Claims Act and things like that. They really go after people that do that.

Doug Glenn: Yeah. Any sense of the time frame for either becoming NIST compliant and/or CMMC compliant?

Joe Coleman: If you are not NIST compliant yet, that can take up to 6 to 12 months. I’ve seen it take more. You can do CMMC and NIST together if you need to because you’re using the same documents. If you’re not NIST compliant, that can take up to 18 months or more. If you are NIST compliant already, you’re talking 6 to 12 months to be CMMC certified.

Joe discusses the limitations of not being NIST compliant.

Doug Glenn: Okay. You just alluded to it, but I just want to make it clear. Can you do them both at the same time in parallel tracks?

Joe Coleman: Yeah, I’m working with clients that are not currently NIST compliant. So, we’re just rolling it into one using the same documents. It’s just that we’ll have to have a different assessor at the end.

Doug Glenn: Let’s say a company just decides they’re not going to be either NIST or CMMC compliant. You can still be a company, right?

Joe Coleman: Oh yeah, you can still do business; you just can’t do business with the DoD. A lot of companies base it on how much of their workload or how much of their business percentage is based on DoD work or from a contractor or subcontractor. If it’s 1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, you need to take a good hard look and say, is it worth putting a lot of money into?

Cost of Certification (26:52)

Doug Glenn: So, they can still be in business and doing well, but they just can’t do any DoD work. So, any ballpark figures? And I realize this probably varies widely depending on the size of the company and everything, but any ballpark sense of how much change we’re talking about here?

Joe Coleman: There’s no official word from the DoD on this, but there are some guesses out there. For NIST 800-171 compliance, depending on your current cybersecurity program that you currently have and how involved it is, I’ve seen it from $15,000 to $60,000.

Doug Glenn: Okay. That’s just for NIST?

Joe Coleman: Just for NIST. For CMMC, and again depending on if you’re NIST compliant, if you are not NIST compliant you’re going to do them together, it could be over $200K (probably easily) to become CMMC certified because you’re also becoming NIST compliant.

Doug Glenn: I’m curious. How come it’s going to cost you maybe 3x as much?

Joe Coleman: One of the main reasons is that with CMMC, you’ll want to hire a registered practitioner organization to guide you through the process and to do the documentation for you. The other is the C3PAO. There are only 54, and they can name their own price.

I can imagine it’s going to be over $100K just for the final assessment.

Doug Glenn: Right, that’s helpful. I think that gives everybody a pretty good sense of what we’re talking about here with CMMC 2.0 and NIST 800-171.

What Can a Registered Practitioner Do for You? (29:02)

Your division of your company, which is Bluestreak Compliance (you’ve already mentioned you’re a registered practitioner), can you give a brief summary of what it is? What do you guys bring to the table?

Joe Coleman: A registered practitioner organization has been certified by the Cyber Accreditation Board (Cyber AB), or CMMC accreditation body. A registered practitioner organization (RPO) works with and hires RPs (registered practitioners) or RPAs (registered practitioner advanced). I happen to be an RPA. And we’ve gone through all the training that we need to have so that the Cyber AB says, okay, you are qualified to do this.

So, when I quote a job, I usually quote it two different ways. One way is just guiding you through the process, so you’re going to do all the heavy lifting. I can supply you with templates and things like that for your documentation and guide you through each step. Or I can quote it where we manage the whole process. We will do all your documentation for you.

Joe Coleman: “You’re going to have at least 1 or 2 full-time employees doing nothing but this.”

Your team will have to be involved in the implementation process. And that’s true both ways. But we normally quote it two different ways, and they choose which one they want based on their budget and things like that.

Doug Glenn: It sounds like what you’re bringing to the table is the ability to get that company from where they are now, wherever they self-assess to start with, up to the point where they can bring in one of the third-party auditors and actually have a reasonable shot at passing the CMMC 2.0 assessment.

Joe Coleman: Correct. And it’s going to take a lot of input from the client or from the companies, too, because you’re going to have at least 1 or 2 full-time employees doing nothing but this. You’ve got to build that cost into it.

That’s what I tell people when we say we can quote it either guiding you or leading the project. It’s not as much work if I am leading the project. But if I’m not leading the project, you’re going to need a team of people to do this. It’s a lot of work.

Cybersecurity Areas To Be Aware Of (31:48)

Doug Glenn: I’m not sure there is an easy answer to this question, but can you give a list of top 3 to 4, or 4 to 5, areas that a company needs to look at when they start doing the NIST and CMMC checklists? Where do you see most companies falling down, or what are the areas they need to be aware of?

Joe Coleman: A lot of the smaller companies do not have a robust cybersecurity program. That is going to be a big pitfall. That’s going to be a big jump for them, not just the work that they have to put into it, but the expense; a lot of small companies just can’t afford that.

Doug Glenn: So, for example, what does that program involve? I mean, is it best practices for handling emails?

Joe Coleman: Everything.

Doug Glenn: What are some of those things?

Joe Coleman: Some of the things are making sure that your network is totally secure and locked down, firewalls. Along with that, you’re going to need endpoint protection on all your devices, mobile device manager. You’re going to have to track every device that has access or could have access to CUI. You have to have a full inventory of that. Your IT system has to be locked down.

Now, this also includes your facility; it includes physical security. That’s talking about your door locks, your alarm systems, things that are going to protect CUI. Camera systems, your server rooms have to be locked down. It’s a lot of physical security, too.

Doug Glenn: Interesting. As well as the protocols for how you handle emails, how data is transferred, where it’s stored, and backups, stuff like that?

Joe Coleman: Yes. And you need to have a policy and a procedure for each one of those. They have to be fully documented every step of the way.

Doug Glenn: Wow. Okay. Sounds like fun, Joe.

Joe Coleman: It is. I enjoy it, but it’s a lot of work.

Doug Glenn: I’m glad somebody enjoys it. I think I’d be swinging from a rope somewhere; you know?

Joe Coleman: I eat, sleep, and drink it.

Doug Glenn: Well, that’s good, I appreciate it. The columns and things that you’ve written for our publication have been helpful to people, I know. And I think this podcast will also be helpful to them. But do you know, for those who are listening and might be attending Furnaces North America, do you know when your talk is?

Joe Coleman: It’s going to be on the 16th at 8:50 a.m., and it’s in room 222.

Doug Glenn: All right.

All right, Joe. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. We’ll look forward to more of your input.

Thanks everyone for listening.

About The Guest

Joe Coleman
Cyber Security Officer
Bluestreak Consulting

Joe Coleman is the cybersecurity officer at Bluestreak Compliance, which is a division of Bluestreak | Bright AM™. Joe has over 35 years of diverse manufacturing and engineering experience. His background includes extensive training in cybersecurity, a career as a machinist, machining manager, and an early additive manufacturing (AM) pioneer. Joe will be speaking at the Furnaces North America (FNA 2024) convention, presenting on DFARS, NIST 800-171, and CMMC 2.0.

Contact Joe at joe.coleman@go-throughput.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #112: Lunch & Learn: How To Use a Hardenability Chart

August 15, 2024 / HARDENING TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO, QUENCHING TECHNICAL CONTENT

In this episode of Heat Treat Radio, Doug Glenn discusses the hardenability of materials with guest Michael Mouilleseaux, general manager at Erie Steel LTD. Michael walks us through how to interpret hardenability charts and provides detailed insights on reading these charts, including addressing the importance of understanding the nuances of complicated part geometry.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Lunch & Learn: How To Use a Hardenability Chart

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Understanding a Hardenability Chart (01:59)

Doug Glenn: What I’d like to do is talk through this chart and learn how to read this a little bit better. And I’d like to ask questions about it because I’m not familiar with this, and I’m sure there are going to be some listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with it. This will be just a quick tutorial on how to read these charts.

Go to the upper, right-hand corner. First off, SAE 4320H is the grade of the steel that we’re talking about?

The Heat Treat Lunch & Learn crew: Doug Glenn, Publisher of Heat Treat Today; Michael Mouilleseaux, General Manager at Erie Steel LTD.; Bethany Leone, Managing Editor of Heat Treat Today
Use this chart to follow along with the conversation.
Source of chart: Erie Steel, Ltd.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Correct.

Doug Glenn: Then the table right below that you’ve got percentage C (carbon). Is Mn manganese?

Michael Mouilleseaux: Manganese.

Doug Glenn: Thank you very much. Silicon, nickel, chrome, moly. My question is about those ranges. Is this basically saying the percentage carbon on the far left in 4320H goes anywhere from 0.17–0.23?

Michael Mouilleseaux: That is correct.

Doug Glenn: Okay. So that’s variability right there. All of those are basically telling you what the ranges are in those alloys in this grade of steel?

Michael Mouilleseaux: That is correct.

Doug Glenn: Then you go down to the top columns of this table below, and it says “Approximate diameter of rounds with same as quenched HRC in inches.” Right?

Approximate diameter of rounds with same as quenched HRC in inches
Source: Erie Steel, Ltd.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Yeah. Essentially, the first three rows are for water quenching. And the bottom three are for oil quenching.

Doug Glenn: If you go over to the second major column called “Location in round,” what’s the size of the round we’re working on here?

Michael Mouilleseaux: It can vary. Go down to where it says, “Mild Oil Quench,” then left to “Surface,” then left then go to “2 inches.” Then, go straight down to the bottom, and that’s approximately J5. So, the “Distance from Quenched End — Sixteenths of an Inch” is Jominy position 5.

Michael Mouilleseaux: If you go to Jominy position 5 on the left-hand chart, you can see the hardness limits for that; the maximum is Rockwell C 41, and the minimum is Rockwell C 29. So, the chemistry can vary provided the hardenability at J5 is 29–41.

Doug Glenn: That’s the acceptable range?

Michael Mouilleseaux: That’s the acceptable range. That’s one way of looking at it. The chemistry would allow you to do that.

Now, go back to the chart on the right-hand side and to “Surface,” move down one row to “¾ radius from center,” and go left to two inches. Moving down from there you see that is Jominy position 8. So, the surface of a two-inch round is Jominy position 5, and the ¾ radius is Jominy position 8.

If you go to the hardness chart on the left-hand side, that says that if you had a two-inch round of 4320H, and it was oil quenched, and you check the hardness at ¾ radius, then the expectation is that it would be 23–34.

Now, go back to the same chart that we were just at, and go to the “Center” row of “Mild oil quench.” Continue left to two inches, and that’s J12. Go back to the left-hand chart, and J12 is 20–29 in the center of the part.

So, the surface of the part could be 41, ¾ radius, center of the part would be 34, and the center of the part would be 29.And that would all meet the criteria.

Doug Glenn: The maximum for J5 would be 41.But at J12 you could get a 20 in the middle.

Michael Mouilleseaux: Right. That is one way to look at this chart. But there is another way.

Notice that it says “rounds.”There are some nuances to having flats and rectangles because, if you think about it, for the cross-sectional area of a rectangle, the hardenability is going to be determined by the direction that it is thinnest, not by the direction that it is thickest.

Take a gear tooth, for example: in the chart that we just made up the gear teeth, the root of the gear was about a half inch, just slightly more; and if we go to this same chart, go to “Center” of “Mild oil quench,” and then go to a “0.5 inch,” and when you go straight down, that’s the J3.

Is a gear necessarily a round? Of course, the answer to that is no. So, in complex shapes you can use this data, but you have to interpolate it in order to understand it.

To some extent, the first time you run this, you’re going to say, “I have a gear, and the root is a half inch across. And I know that the J3 is 40. And I’ll run this part, and I’ll section it and I’ll measure it and it’s 40. And I’ll say that’s a good approximation of that.” And experientially, you build confidence in this, that is, it’s your operation, your quenching operation, and your components. It allows you to interpolate these, and they become extremely useful.

So, is it definitive? No. Is it useful? Yes.

Doug Glenn: It gives you a ballpark, right? I mean, it’s giving you something, maybe guardrails.

Michael Mouilleseaux: It gives you a ballpark; it gives you guardrails. And I can tell you that after having run gear product in the same equipment for ten years, I can say that it’s definitive. I can say that if I have this hardenability, and I get this hardenability number for this heat, and these gears are made from this heat of steel, and it has a J3 of 42. If I’m at 38, I know something is going on other than just hardenability. And, at that point, I would suspect my heat treat operation.

Doug Glenn: Yeah. I have one more question about this chart: On the bottom right part of the graph there are two plot lines on there. What do those represent? I was thinking one represented the water quench and the bottom one represents the oil quench.

Plot lines representing maximum hardenability and minimum hardenability
Source: Erie Steel, Ltd.

Michael Mouilleseaux: The top one represents the maximum hardenability. And the lower the lower one represents the minimum hardenability.

Doug Glenn: That’s your band. Okay. Those are basically your values over on the left-hand side then. Very good.

I don’t know about you, but I found that helpful. I really didn’t ever know how to read these tables. So, maybe someone else will find that useful. Thanks, Michael. I appreciate your expertise.

Michael Mouilleseaux: It’s been my pleasure.

About The Guest

Michael Mouilleseaux is general manager at Erie Steel LTD. Mike has been at Erie Steel in Toledo, OH, since 2006 with previous metallurgical experience at New Process Gear in Syracuse, NY, and as the Director of Technology in Marketing at FPM Heat Treating LLC in Elk Grove, IL. Having graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering, Mike has proved his expertise in the field of heat treat, co-presenting at the 2019 Heat Treat show and currently serving on the Board of Trustees at the Metal Treating Institute.

Contact Mike at mmouilleseaux@erie.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #111: Heat Treat NextGen Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath

July 18, 2024 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT TECH

If curiosity were a person, Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath would be her name. Having risen at Moog, Inc. to the position of materials and process engineer, Brynna shares her early STEM interests and how she stays up-to-date on industry trends and ideas. In this highly engaging NextGen profile on Heat Treat Radio — with host and Heat Treat Today’s publisher, Doug Glenn — get to know this talented metallurgist.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Meet Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath (01:00)

Doug Glenn: Let’s jump into today’s Heat Treat Radio episode with Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath from Moog, Inc. It’s a great pleasure to be here today with Brynna, who is one of our 40 Under 40 Class of 2023 award recipients. First off, congratulations on that award, and welcome to Heat Treat Radio.

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Thank you so much. That was an honor.

Doug Glenn: Brynna lives just south of Buffalo, New York. As you know, this interview is to get to know you a little bit more — how you got into metallurgy, heat treating, and all that good stuff. Let’s start way back. Give us a little bit about yourself as a younger person, maybe high school age and moving on up through, and then how you got involved with heat treating and metallurgy.

Check out Brynna’s 40 Under 40 profile. Click the logo.

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Sure. I grew up in a little town called West Falls, south of Buffalo, New York, and about 20 minutes from Moog. While I was in high school, I took AP chemistry and physics and fell in love with those topics. I knew from a younger age that I was going to wind up being an engineer eventually; I just didn’t know what kind. But I was pretty sure I wanted to be a chemical engineer, so I toured a couple of colleges.

At one of them, I met with a materials science professor to talk about the differences between chemical and materials science engineering. I was sold. I was all set and ready to go be a polymers engineer. I picked Purdue University, started going there, and was absolutely loving it.

The summer after my freshman year, I got an internship with Moog, which was right around the corner from my hometown. The internship was primarily metallurgical, due to the nature of Moog’s products, and I absolutely loved it. I was not expecting to like it, and it was just so great. So, I transitioned all of my coursework over to metallurgy, and I kept coming back to Moog for internships, and that was fantastic.

Learning from Industry Experts (03:32)

When I started off at Moog, it was right around the time when two of our subject matter experts in heat treatment were transitioning to retirement. I started learning as much as I could as fast as I could about heat treatment. There was obviously a lot to learn there, but it was a great time.

After working at Moog for a couple of years, I decided I wanted to go back and pursue my other passion, which was manufacturing engineering. So, right now I’m working on a master’s degree after work to combine metallurgy and manufacturing.

“When I started off at Moog, it was right around the time when two of our subject matter experts in heat treatment were transitioning to retirement. I started learning as much as I could as fast as I could about heat treatment.”

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath, Moog

Doug Glenn: Wow. You’re a classic overachiever. That’s pretty good. And you said Purdue, correct?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Yeah.

Doug Glenn: Okay. And you did your undergrad there. Did you actually end up graduating with a materials engineering degree or a metallurgy degree?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Materials science and engineering.

Brynna shares how she got started in the industry.
Source: Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn: All right. Good. You spent the summers back at Moog and enjoyed that. You know, we see a lot of the older generation retiring, so you’re filling the brain drain, as we say, which is great. Are there are many other young people at Moog?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Yeah, their internship co-op program has been fantastic in bringing in a lot of students right out of college and getting them hooked on our product line and the sort of manufacturing we do. And we’re definitely getting more recent college graduates. But, you know, with people retiring, those are some awfully big shoes to fill.

Doug Glenn: For sure. What exactly does Moog make at your facility? They’re a large corporation; I know they usually make a lot of automotive, maybe aerospace, components but are you able to say specifically what Moog does there?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: We specialize in high precision motion actuation systems. From a metallurgical side, we’re working with a ton of really cool materials. So it’s not just steels or aluminum, it is a lot of aerospace applications, defense. The materials and process engineering group is physically orchestrated on our headquarters campus as well as the space and defense building, so we do get to see quite a bit of that. From the metallurgical perspective, there is a lot to see and work on.

Doug Glenn: You mentioned you were thinking about being a chemical engineer, but then you saw the materials. Do you remember what it was about that and metallurgy that attracted you? Anything specific?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I remember sitting through that talk with a materials professor at Purdue, and he was talking about what the day to day of a chemical engineer versus materials engineer looks like. I will not pretend that he wasn’t biased, because he was a materials professor. But the work he described for materials engineering was so diverse, and there were options for different settings and what you could end up working on — from being in a steel mill to working in a lab like I do. There are a lot of options, a lot of cool things. The slogan at Purdue was something along the lines of: you can’t make it without materials.

Brynna’s Family Background (07:30)

Doug Glenn: That’s really neat. So, I haven’t asked you about your family at all. What did they think when you told them, hey, I’m thinking about being a materials engineer or a metallurgist?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: My father is an industrial engineer, and my mother is a pharmacometrician, so they’re both in the stem field already. I think it was no surprise that I was going to pursue engineering and then, metallurgical engineering specifically. I think they were happy to encourage me to pursue any of my passions. And my father knew a couple of materials engineers and thought that it would work out for me. They were excited.

Undergraduate Research (08:16)

Doug Glenn: They were very supportive. That’s great. When you did your undergrad at Purdue, did you have to work on a final paper or any specific projects that were of interest to you?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I did some undergraduate research in the metallurgy realm. But my senior project for graduation was along the lines of characterizing shot for shot peening and the degradation of shot and the residual stress that it imparts. It was like a cool mix of FEA modeling with actually characterizing the material. It was a neat project.

Doug Glenn: Have you had to do any of that at Moog?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: There’s a fair deal of materials characterization. We have shot peening, but I’m not super involved with it.

Current Work at Moog (09:35)

Doug Glenn: Gotcha. That’s interesting. Can you describe what your typical day at Moog looks like now and what you’re working on?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Sure. My typical day is a good deal of talking with all types of engineers, explaining metallurgical concepts. Because we work on a lot of different materials, there’s a lot to understand there. A good portion of my role is talking with other engineers about how a heat treatment procedure works or what’s metallurgically happening, how to modify a manufacturing sequence, how to design so that the product’s going to work.

But then I also specifically work in a failure analysis lab. This could be anything from something’s coming off the manufacturing line a little bit wrong or something failed in the field. We’ve got a beautiful characterization lab full of all the toys that you could think of, including two SEMs and a chemical lab. There’s a good deal of analysis there, too.

Doug Glenn: You seem like a person who enjoys your work. Is there any specific story or instance of something happening, either in school or at work, that really made you happy that you were in metallurgy and heat treat?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Oh, goodness. That’s a good question.

I would have to say I’ve had a couple projects at work, without getting into too many specifics, where we discovered something new metallurgically that we didn’t know was happening before. And then working through that, how did we not know it before? What do we know about it now? And what are we going to do to utilize this new thing that we discovered and take advantage of it? From a heat treat perspective, sometimes that means modifying our procedures, modifying our fixturing, creating something new.

It’s neat to see the modifications happen and come up with the new parts on the other end. It’s been very exciting to work on interdisciplinary teams like that.

“My typical day is a good deal of talking with all types of engineers, explaining metallurgical concepts. Because we work on a lot of different materials, there’s a lot to understand there. A good portion of my role is talking with other engineers about how a heat treatment procedure works or what’s metallurgically happening, how to modify a manufacturing sequence, how to design so that the product’s going to work.”
Source: Heat Treat Today

Doug Glenn: Yeah. I’m curious about this. You’ve been out in the work world for how many years?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Three and a half.

Doug Glenn: Okay. So, you’ve been out of school and working four years, and the amount you know about metallurgy and heat treating now is four years’ worth. Does it kind of amaze you the amount of stuff we don’t know?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Absolutely. Metallurgy is an old science, but you know we’re still [developing] the tools and technology and it’s great to find out new things.

Doug Glenn: Right. A lot of people get involved and say, “Well, I don’t want to go into metallurgy and heat treat because it’s a mature industry,” but I was curious if you felt the same way.

It’s really quite fascinating because there is a lot that happens. Like you were saying at Moog when you discovered things, a lot of stuff that’s happening and we really don’t know why. The more we can discover about it, the better.

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Absolutely.

Top Industry Resources (12:58)

Doug Glenn: Let me ask you this. You obviously come from a smart family; you’ve got parents who are well educated, and you are as well. What are some of the metallurgical/heat treat resources that you use to stay current?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I think the best resource that’s out there is people. The network that I’ve been growing comes from a variety of different sources. I’m part of a few industrial committees, and it’s just a great way to meet people from all ends of the spectrum of metallurgy — from those producing the material to those making something out of it to the people who are going to use it all the way down the line.

Finding other metallurgists in those realms, and also through venues like ASM and our local Buffalo chapter — meeting people who have more experience than I do and have seen it before. If I’m seeing something for the first time, there’s definitely someone who spent their whole career on that. It’s really great to tap into those resources. That’s my number one.

And then my second choice would be the ASM handbooks. I’ve always got at least two open on my desk.

“I think the best resource that’s out there is people.”

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath, Moog

Doug Glenn: Those are great resources. ASM over the years has pumped out some very, very good stuff. Is there anything else about your work or your schooling that is of interest or excited you that you’d like to share?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I really liked working at Moog because it’s a cool application where I can use my metallurgical knowledge along with this new manufacturing knowledge that I’m building up. That was my favorite intersection with my undergrad degree. And now I get to actually try that out in a working sense. That’s been great.

Doug Glenn: And you’re doing a master’s in industrial engineering?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Manufacturing engineering.

Doug Glenn: Where are you doing that?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: The University of Michigan.

Doug Glenn: Remotely, I’m assuming?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Yes.

Doug Glenn: Very nice. And how far along are you, and how much longer do you have to go there?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I’m hoping to graduate in December, so I’m coming closer to the finish line.

Doug Glenn: Congratulations. That’s really good.

Rapid-Fire Round (15:44)

Doug Glenn: I want to move off of metallurgy and heat treat just to learn a little bit more about Brynna. All right, so these quick questions are what I call the rapid-fire round. Brace yourself. Are you a Mac or a PC person?

Digital vs. print?: “I prefer digital. I like to have all of my work life very organized by topic, and it’s way easier for me to organize everything if I have a digital copy of it.”

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I am a Mac person through and through. I love my Mac.

Doug Glenn: Do you use a Mac at work?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I wish, but no.

Doug Glenn: We have an ongoing debate here. We had a couple people that came into the organization with Macs, and I’ve always been a PC guy. So, anytime there’s a computer problem, we tease each other, “Well, that’s because you’re working on a Mac/you’re working on a PC.” Well, that’s good to know. And for your phone: Are you an Apple phone person?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Yeah, I’ve got an iPad. And I just got a new MacBook Air the other day.

Doug Glenn: You’re hardcore. Very good.

So, we’re a publishing company here at Heat Treat Today. And I like to ask this question: When you consume media, do you prefer hard copy or digital?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I prefer digital. I like to have all of my work life very organized by topic, and it’s way easier for me to organize everything if I have a digital copy of it. So even if it’s a print copy, I’ve been known to scan and file it the way that I file everything else.

Doug Glenn: Okay. Now what do you value more in work — a flexible work schedule or high pay?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I’m going to go with flexible work schedule. I’ve had some people close to me who have the high pay but no flexibility. And they’re the ones more jealous, so I’m going to go with that. I’ll take the flexibility.

Doug Glenn: That’s a great answer. Here’s one: Would you rather work remotely or in an office?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: In an office 100%, I am definitely of the variety that likes to be around people. I would rather have people to talk to face to face than doing it over Teams.

Doug Glenn: I kind of assumed you were like that. How did you handle all the isolation that came with the recent pandemic?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I was still in college at that time for most of Covid. Purdue was only remote for half of one semester. It was a reasonably short time. And then the rest of the time we had limited capacity in classrooms and things. But when I was coming back for my internships, our department was classified as essential. We were coming into the office every day, and that was good, I enjoyed that.

Doug Glenn: So, you didn’t necessarily really have a lot of the isolation or as much as you might have had.

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Yep.

Doug Glenn: That’s good. Okay, I won’t keep going down that road. I think that whole time period has been very impactful on our society. And I’m curious how people feel it has affected them.

I know you love working at Moog, but if you had a dream job, what would it be?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I don’t know. I think someday down the line, it would be cool to have my own manufacturing business. I don’t have a product in mind at the moment, but in my thoughts it has to do with metallic components and heat treatment, because that’s my passion. That would be great.

Doug Glenn: Very interesting, owning your own company and manufacturing something metal. You know what? That’s where it starts. You’re three and a half years out, and you’ve got time to develop more specificity over time. But that’s good to even know that you’re moving in that direction.

I assume you don’t work all the time. What do you do? What do you do in your free time? What do you like? What are your passions outside of work?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: The number one time consumer at the moment is that master’s degree. But then, you know, on a pure fun basis, my husband and I are avid golfers. And all of the very short Buffalo summer we’re trying to be out there on the golf course.

“But then, you know, on a pure fun basis, my husband and I are avid golfers. And all of the very short Buffalo summer we’re trying to be out there on the golf course.”
Source: Richard-7 / Getty Images Signature

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I’m also a bluegrass fiddler. I play in a couple bands. And that’s pretty fun, too. It’s almost Saint Patrick’s Day.

Doug Glenn: You’re a musician? You know, I’ve heard that there are some engineering schools who don’t ask you if you play an instrument, they ask you what instrument you play because there is a correlation somehow or other between music and engineering. Maybe it’s the methodical-ness, the orderliness, and all that stuff.

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Neat, I didn’t know that.

Doug Glenn: If you’re playing bluegrass fiddle, I assume you play some by ear. I mean, I assume you’ve got some sort of natural talent there. Is that safe to say?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Yeah, I started that at a decently young age. And now my husband and I are learning piano as well, so it’s been fun.

Doug Glenn: What does your husband do by chance?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: He’s a software engineer.

Doug Glenn: Two engineers in one house. That’s got to be interesting dinner time talk. That’s wonderful.

Okay. Last question for you. I give people an option here. You can answer any one of these three. What would be your favorite app, movie, or magazine?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: The first thing that came to my mind when you asked that question was Audible. At the moment, I’m hooked on reading, or listening, to a lot of books. I consider it reading in the little bits of downtime here and there grocery shopping and driving in the car and things like that. It’s nice to spend that time a little bit more productively.

Doug Glenn: I’m with you. I think that’s great. I assume maybe you can even do some of your school reading on Audible?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I haven’t tried that yet. Honestly.

Doug Glenn: Sometimes people learn better by actually reading. But other people learn better by listening, so that’s fine.

If you were to encourage young people to really look into metallurgy materials, what would you tell them? What would be your encouragement to them?

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: I think the most impactful thing for me at that age was actually getting to see what they do. At Moog, I act as a tour guide for a lot of high school students. I try to show them as closely as possible what we do and what a day looks like. Because it’s great to think about the theory, but at the end of the day when you graduate with that degree, you’ve got to go work. I encourage high school students to get out there and see as many jobs as possible. Shadow people — I guess that would be my advice.

Doug Glenn: That’s good. Well, Brynna, thanks so much. Congratulations again on being awarded 40 Under 40 this last year. And thanks for taking some time to chat with us.

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath: Thank you so much.

About The Guest

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath
Materials and Process Engineer
Moog, Inc.
Source: Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath

Brynna Keelin Kelly-McGrath received her bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Purdue University Honors College. She is currently working on a master’s degree in Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Brynna conducts metallurgical support for day-to-day heat tree issues and non-conformances across several divisions within Moog, Inc. She was recognized in Heat Treat Today’s 40 Under 40 Class of 2023.

Contact Brynna by visiting Moog, Inc.’s website: www.moog.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #110: Isolated Heat, the Future of Vacuum Furnaces

June 20, 2024 / FEATURED NEWS, HEAT TREAT RADIO, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT NEWS, VACUUM FURNACES

Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, and guest Bryan Stern from Gasbarre Thermal Processing Systems discuss the shift from single chamber batch furnaces to isolated heat vacuum furnaces. They explore the benefits and challenges of isolated heat systems, including temperature control, cycle times, and cost effectiveness for handling various parts.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #110: Isolated Heat, the Future of Vacuum Furnaces

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Introduction to Isolated Heat Vacuum Furnaces (00:01:30)

Doug Glenn: We want to talk about something that Gasbarre is calling isolated heat furnaces. In this case, these are vacuum furnaces. What’s an isolated heat vacuum furnace? And why is it called “isolated heat?”

Bryan Stern: To start off, this isn’t something that’s Gasbarre specific. This is a generic distinction and concept with furnaces. It’s been around for a while, but the primary difference with an isolated heat furnace is that the heat chamber in that furnace stays at temperature, in between processing and throughout the process, and it’s held under vacuum during that time as well.

Doug Glenn: Gotcha. We’re going to talk primarily about vacuum furnaces — though, I know that’s also possible in an atmosphere — and the typical vacuum furnace today is the single-chamber vacuum furnace. Maybe it’s obvious already, but can you explain the differences between the isolated heat and a typical single chamber?

Bryan Stern: The single-chamber, batch processing furnace is by far and away the most prevalent technology that’s used. And the difference is that everything in that process is going to happen in a sequential order — everything from loading, evacuating the chamber, ramping everything (the chamber and the work) up to temperature, holding it, doing whatever process you have, cooling it back down, backfilling it, and then unloading it. It’s all a sequential operation. You close the door, the work sits in the same place, and you run through the entire process.

gray vacuum oil quench furnace from Gasbarre — Gasbarre’s Vacuum Oil Quench Furnace, with isolated graphite heating chamber, includes 2 BAR gas quench capabilities.
Source: Gasbarre Thermal Processing Systems

Whereas, with the isolated heat, it remains at temperature. That requires three primary additional components in addition to your single-chamber batch. It requires an extra chamber, for evacuating because you’re going to need an antechamber or a way to load that work in after having pumped it down. So, by default you need a second chamber. You need some kind of dynamic sealing door between the two chambers that you can open once your evacuation chamber is pumped down; and you need some means of moving the work between those two chambers.

These are the fundamental differences. But where it gets interesting is the impact it has on the rest of operations and efficiency.

Doug Glenn: The single chamber has dominated the market for a long time. How have those single-chamber furnaces really affected the design of vacuum furnaces? And are there some significant design differences in these isolated heat furnaces?

Bryan Stern: Yeah. It’s kind of funny, but anyone who’s familiar with single-chamber batch furnaces recognizes there are a lot of challenges to doing vacuum processing that way.A simple way to look at it is if you were trying to cook pizzas in an oven: But if you had to start with the oven cold, open the door, put the pizza in, and then you can’t touch it until the whole thing goes through its process; you heat up the oven and then wait till it cools down at the end and pull it out. It wouldn’t be an ideal approach.

A simple way to look at it is if you were trying to cook pizzas in an oven: But if you had to start with the oven cold, open the door, put the pizza in, and then you can’t touch it until the whole thing goes through its process; you heat up the oven and then wait till it cools down at the end and pull it out. It wouldn’t be an ideal approach.

Bryan Stern, Gasbarre

That’s the distinction with the vacuum portion of it specifically. For a lot of single-chamber batch equipment, you have to pump it down and wait to preheat the oven. That adds a lot of time. So, the then it makes vacuum processing more expensive, and it’s harder to scale. People know there is inconvenience around vacuum processing in general. And the answer to that has typically been to increase workload sizes because if you’re going to have dead time at the front, you’d rather distribute that cost over a thousand parts instead of a hundred parts.

You want to increase the throughput so you’re not waiting for a bunch of little batches and paying for all that dead time with a few parts.

Equipment Challenges with Single Chamber (00:06:32)

Bryan Stern: There’s been a general trend to just increase load sizes, and I am generalizing. It’s not necessary for everything. But you get into some massive single-chamber batch furnaces that are often larger than necessary for the parts. And, unfortunately, those load sizes are kind of detrimental to a lot of the objectives of heat treating.

You have a much more difficult time maintaining uniformity for both process temperature and gas for the parts while you’re heating up and cooling down. And you’re going to have a much higher deviation between the temperature at the center of the load and the surface of the load, as well as process gas concentrations.

That trend toward larger load sizes than necessary (because of the inherent challenges of the single-chamber batch method) leads to other challenges that you then have to overcome. It takes longer to soak out, and quite often (something that I’m sure a lot of people will be familiar with) you end up leaving gaps in the work zone anyway — spaces between parts to allow gas circulation to achieve quench rates enabling you to cool faster because you’re not getting enough gas to the center of the load. Since you have these massive loads, you’ve moved in a direction that’s not really helping anything that you’re trying to do. And that’s a bus that we’ve all been on.

Doug Glenn: So, you’ve got uniformity issues inside the load. And that’s an interesting perspective. The process takes so long inside that one chamber, it tends to increase the size of the load so that you’re doing more at once.

How about the efficiency of the process? If you’ve got a chamber that is designed just for isolated heat, and you’re just heating in that chamber, I would assume that chamber can be designed differently than a chamber in which you’re going to do preheat convective.

Bryan Stern: Absolutely. There are of trying to do everything in one space. I think the equipment challenges come from exactly what you’re talking about — trying to heat and cool in the same space. Anyone who’s been remotely involved in the production of single-chamber batch equipment knows that you’re doing a bunch of things that are in tension with one another. To start, if you’re trying to cool in the same space, very often you’re putting nozzle penetrations all through your insulation pack.

Right away you’ve shot your thermal efficiency in the foot because you have direct radiation out of those nozzles. And people have tried with marginal success to come up with ways of sealing off those nozzles during the heating section and opening them during cooling. Some tried more static approaches, some active changes to the furnace.

But the other issue is that you’re hurting the cooling, too, because you’re restricting your gas flow. You’re heating up the gas that you’re trying to cool with by flowing it through this hot insulation pack. Your parts are sitting inside that heat cage. They’re radiating to a hot surface. Another thing worth pointing out is that often with a single-chamber batch, because you have such a limited time to pump down and you’re trying to decrease your cycle time as much as possible, the installation’s reduced just to help with vacuum levels.

Again, if you’re holding that under vacuum and you can allow it to outgas and decay, now you can have a much thicker insulation pack. You’re not putting penetrations through it. So, it’s helping your thermal efficiency in multiple ways. For example, it’s helping your cooling. When you’re struggling to get those cooling rates, you’re going to do things like bump up gas pressure. Since you’re consuming more processed gas, you’ll put a bigger motor in it — which not only costs more upfront, but it also costs more to run.

That’s a fun fact about especially high horsepower, single-chamber batch equipment: Very often the current rating for the entire system can be driven by the gas blower alone. It’s more than all the rest of the power supply, so they’re not cheap to run.

I’m not saying that you get away with half the size motor, but intuitively you know you’re requiring more than you would need if you placed that load in a dedicated cooling space, no response to gas flow radiating to a water cool jacket. So, it’s a pretty intuitive observation about the way we’re currently approaching this.

Doug Glenn: I don’t think people have thought about it because that has not been the typical way of doing it. It’s almost all single chamber.

Bryan Stern: We’re locked in there.

Doug Glenn: But when you do start thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense that your efficiencies would improve — design and operational efficiencies. All those things would improve because you’ve got dedicated chambers.

Bryan Stern: Another thing with regard to efficiency is your size and your power supply to overcome all those losses, the decreased insulation. When you move to dedicated positions, you know in your position that ramping your power supply can be sized for it. And people have worked to overcome that with typical power supply sizing by doing things like adding multiple taps on the secondary side of the transformer to try to get a better power factor. But if you’re dedicating stations within your equipment, then you can right-size your power supply.

Two men (Doug Glenn, Bryan Stern) talking, HTR banner on top — Bryan Stern: “When you move to dedicated positions, you know in your position that ramping your power supply can be sized for it. And people have worked to overcome that with typical power supply sizing by doing things like adding multiple taps on the secondary side of the transformer to try to get a better power factor. But if you’re dedicating stations within your equipment, then you can right-size your power supply.”

Recent Developments (00:13:21)

Doug Glenn: That brings me to a question about the single-chamber vacuum furnaces that have typically been used. To my knowledge, there are not a lot of isolated heat furnaces or dedicated chamber vacuum furnaces out there, although, I know that one of the companies you guys acquired years ago made their name there. But have there been any developments in recent years that have led to more popularity for, or the possibility of doing, isolated heat vacuum furnaces?

Bryan Stern: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s something that I’ve done a lot of thinking about because we tend to have a mentality with technology that if it was such a great idea, people would be doing it. So, why aren’t more people doing this?

We can learn a lot from looking at another industry. Specifically, the prevalence and immersion of some of the emissions regulations that are coming along is newer to our industry. I think we’ve been able to get away with doing things in a way that might be really inefficient for a while. But it’s not new in some other industries.

There is a great example that I love because it has so many analogies for what we’re looking at in vacuum heat treating specifically: If you look at the history of the adoption of fuel injection in the automobile industry — I’ve always assumed that fuel injection was adopted as soon as it came along because it was a better technology, and it had been around since the 1920s and 30s.

It was developed and used in some military applications, and right away it was hailed as a better technology. It was more efficient, it was cleaner, but people just didn’t want to change. That wasn’t the direction that everyone was moving in. There were some manufacturers that tried. There were some mass-produced vehicles that had fuel injection in the early 1950s, but it still wasn’t taking off.

And then in 1970 the pushed manufacturers specifically to start adapting it more. But it wasn’t welcome. Some supporting technologies needed to be developed better, especially with computers controlling those systems. As reliability increased for those throughout the ‘80s, there were some amendments to the Clean Air Act from 1970. Then it really started to hit the market and be adopted. And what finally sent it is that consumers started to experience the benefits.

Now we don’t even think twice about it. It’s the de facto standard. You’re not going to go find a car dealership in your area that has their specialty line of carbureted vehicles. There are still places they’re used, but the advantages of fuel injection are so great because you’ve got dramatically improved fuel efficiency and much longer engine life. People say cars last way longer than they used to. And it’s because this new technology that had been around for almost a century, by the early 2000s, had been sitting around, and people hadn’t experienced the advantages of it.

One of the things that I love about that analogy is that it also demonstrates this isn’t a complete switch. It’s a gradual change, and there’s still a place for the old technology. It doesn’t mean that isolated are going to completely replace single-chamber batch vacuums. But if you look at the places carbureted engines are still used, you’ll find them on a racetrack or in lawn equipment.

So, in these places where the upfront cost is really important and you’re not getting enough operating time on it, the improved efficiency is not going to pay off if you were to pay up-front since you’re not using it enough. That carries over well to some of the single-chamber batch vacuums because they will always be around, and they’re going to be more preferred for intermittent use applications where the runtime is not as long.

Doug Glenn: That’s an interesting perspective. Have any of the technologies developed recently — like transfer mechanisms, control systems, or anything of that sort? Is there anything substantially new that had to take place before you could get isolated heat furnaces, or have most of those technologies, similar to the fuel injection, been around for a long time?

Bryan Stern: I think they’ve been around like that analogous technology adoption. There’s certainly going to be a refinement of some technologies to be robust for it to work.

Click on the link to read more about Bryan Stern in his Heat Treat Today 40Under40 profile.

There are some good solutions out there. There are some bad solutions out there. And I think the higher possibility of getting into a bad solution with a less mature product is one of those obstacles people are facing. Things don’t change when forces are in equilibrium. So, the fact that we’re not changing as an industry to adopt some of this stuff just means that the forces motivating that change have not overcome the obstacles. There are definitely some obstacles to it.

And I’m sure we’ll get into talking about those some, but we have that nudge from regulation that’s happening. We’ll see, and continue to see, this type of product mature and those dynamic sealing mechanisms and transfer systems. And I think what’s really going to send it is that there are a lot of benefits that address a lot of problems that we’re all familiar with. It’s just not the de facto standard.

There are ways that the industry is organized around the methods that we use currently. A great example of that is the pizza example where you look at the back of the box of pizza, and you’ve got a recipe that says to preheat the oven and then pop it in for 15 minutes. If you can’t do that anymore, and you have to put the pizza in while the oven is cold and let it ramp up, now you have to change the recipe. And that’s the way we’re organized right now. We’re organized with processes for material that’s starting cold. It’s actually a harder way to do things, because the way that different equipment ramps up is harder to control. So, it’s not necessarily a better recipe, but it’s what we have.

The vacuum level specifications are another big impact. In single-chamber batch equipment, you’re exposing it to atmosphere every cycle, and you’ve got to pump it down quickly. So even when you pump it to very low vacuum levels, what’s left is still often oxidizing constituents.

If you can hold it at vacuum (even though it’s not getting to the same ultra-low pressures), and if it’s allowed to absorb from the surfaces and outgassing from materials (even at a higher pressure), you can have a pure environment. And that’s really counterintuitive. It’s not built into equipment specs because people associate the vacuum level with purity, and it’s really more about dew point and the constituents of what’s in the gas. You can have just as pure an environment with much higher pressure. And again, we’re just not organized around that right now.

Continuous and Non-Continuous Systems (00:21:56)

Doug Glenn: Let me restate something you said earlier and tell me if I’m accurate on it. You were saying that because of the single-chamber vacuum furnaces, we tend to increase the load sizes. So, I’m assuming the load size of the isolated heat furnaces could be significantly smaller and, therefore, have better uniformity within the load, both in the heat up and the quench. Is that an inherent advantage of the isolated heat?

Bryan Stern: It’s not specific to all isolated heat equipment. We’d have to get into discussing the fact that you can’t have continuous and non-continuous isolated heat systems. And it’s an important distinction. The distinction being that you have your heat chamber, you’re keeping it at temperature in a multi-chamber batch system, which is still a form of isolated heat equipment. You’re going to be moving your work in and out the same direction.

So, you’ll get a lot of the advantages that we’ve talked about. You’re able to have dedicated design for heating and cooling. You’ll have your thermal efficiency. There are a couple things you’re not going to get. You’re not going to be able to increase the throughput. Whereas, if you move to a continuous furnace where you’re moving that work in, and then you’re moving it to the other side . . . We can keep working with the pizza analogy: If you need more pizzas, and it takes 15 minutes for a pizza, you can move it through three stations for five minutes per station. Now, you’re getting a pizza every five minutes instead of every 15 minutes, right? If you’re able to do that and produce loads faster, then you can decrease the load size. And then you’re going to see all the benefits of decreasing that load size — improved uniformity, faster times, and better cooling.

red lettering and green lettering to the right of a red flame with green arrows circling it — Click on the image to read “Vacuum Heat Treating in a Carbon-Conscious Market” by Bryan Stern, in Heat Treat Today’s November 2023 Sustainability issue.

But you only get that if you go to continuous. With that specific type of isolated heat equipment, versus just any isolated heat equipment, you’ll get much better thermal efficiencies because in the multi-chamber batch setup you’re not heating and cooling the furnace every time and throwing that energy away. But because you’re loading and unloading on the same size, you’re still going to leave that heat chamber unoccupied, sitting and holding its temperature, consuming energy in between loads. With continuous furnaces, you’re not going to do that. You’re never going to throw all that energy away. There’s minimal holding power required. So, there is a distinction between the continuous and non-continuous isolated.

Doug Glenn: How would it work with a non-continuous isolated heat furnace? If the process required you to preheat, heat, and quench, what is it you’re going to use? Transfer cars? How does that work?

Bryan Stern: If you have multiple heating levels, you can still control the heat. But often you’d introduce it at an intermediate temperature and then ramp it up the rest of the way. So again, all the advantages that you get as far as quenching, typically with a two-chamber piece of equipment like that, your quench chamber is going to serve double duty as your evacuation chamber. You’re putting it into the quench chamber first, evacuating it again, and bringing it back and quenching it.

Challenges with Isolated Heat Systems (00:26:39)

Doug Glenn: These systems sound good, but I’m sure there are some challenges. Are there some drawbacks? I can hear some people saying, these sound like great pieces of equipment — especially the continuous version. I can understand the efficiencies, but what about the complexity? Is the design complexity of these units an issue?

Bryan Stern: It’s definitely one that I face a lot on the application side. It’s a much more complicated process — especially because the process itself is going to impact each of those positions. And you would care if I sold you an oven for your kitchen, and the only thing I cared about was that it can go to this temperature, and it can operate at this pressure, but I didn’t care what you did with it, I didn’t care how much work you get through it. I just had these maximum parameters.

As soon as you move to talking about continuous, you’re right away much more involved in throughput — going to drive and often the number of positions to get the index rate you need for the load size. Now you care how long each step of the process takes, and you’re trying to balance that among positions so that you’re not letting anything sit longer than it needs to because you’re over this particular soak time.

Trying to get continuous equipment sized for an application is more of a process than some people are expecting. And again, we’re just not wired that way. So, you can throw out a spec for a single-chamber batch furnace and say you need this operating temperature, this ultimate vacuum level, and this uniformity . . . and more! But when you come and want to get into a piece of equipment like this, we’re going to have a couple conversations — we’re going to talk about some things no one else is asking. And that’s what can be a hurdle up front, though we’re able to overcome it.

Two men (Doug Glenn, Bryan Stern) talking in split screen, no hands seen — Bryan Stern, Gasbarre, discusses furnace cost effectiveness and flexibility. “It’s just going to be a lot more expensive if you’re doing a process that doesn’t require the way that that furnace was built. So, it’s not that you locked yourself in. It’s just that if you’re constantly changing processes or you have much shorter processes or the throughput isn’t a benefit, then that’s where a single-chamber batch might be a better solution.”

Doug Glenn: But it also may limit flexibility, I assume, of the different processes you could run in that equipment, too. In a batch system, you can put the load in there and do whatever you want, it’s going to potentially take longer to get it done. But maybe in an isolated heat system, where the heat chamer is only designed to do X, maybe you can’t do X times two. Does that make sense?

Bryan Stern: Yeah. It’s not as much true for a two-chamber or multi-chamber isolated heat batch style furnace because you have the same flexibility of dedicated design. On a continuous furnace, but if you’re going to be doing that a lot, is it worth paying for something that can be optimized one way if you’re going to be using it in a flexible way. They have a lot of flexibility — I would argue just as much as batch. It’s just going to be a lot more expensive if you’re doing a process that doesn’t require the way that that furnace was built. So, it’s not that you locked yourself in. It’s just that if you’re constantly changing processes or you have much shorter processes or the throughput isn’t a benefit, then that’s where a single-chamber batch might be a better solution.

Cost Effectiveness (00:30:23)

Doug Glenn: And then the other objection that jumps to my mind is capital equipment outlay. Can we address that, compared to single chamber?

Bryan Stern: This is this is another one that’s near and dear to my heart because I think there’s a lot of misconception here since it’s very application specific and hard to answer generally. But like we talked about, you’re going to have another chamber.

So, if you’re looking at a smaller system, it may not immediately be more cost effective. If you’re looking at a continuous system that’s replacing several furnaces, now you’re not paying for that oversized power supply on each piece of equipment; you’re not paying for a pumping system for each piece of equipment; you’re just buying it for the one evacuation chamber. Or maybe you have a backup, but now you’re starting to distribute and be much more selective about your material cost, and there’s definitely a break-even point in there.

It’s really a question of whether or not the process improvements are enough of a benefit on the smaller size. But very quickly the upfront cost starts to lean in favor of the continuous, especially if you’re looking at multiple pieces of equipment.

But the bigger thing here, the thing that I feel more passionate about, is that we tend to get really hung up on the upfront cost. And I think that’s something that can be very detrimental to missing out on value. It’s very easy to say: I’m going to have this amount of revenue, I’m going to pay this for equipment, and I’m not going to dive into maintenance and operating costs — and that’s a difficult question to answer but is a huge piece of the puzzle. Yet we often don’t put in the legwork because the information is not readily available. And it takes a more sophisticated accounting approach to look at project value over the life of the equipment.

Intuitively, we know that you could pay more for something that would improve efficiency or throughput or performance because in the long run that would pay off. And going back to the car analogy, when is the last time you bought a car and didn’t pay any attention to the fuel economy on it? It’s hard to do that without a little bit more accounting elegance.

Intuitively, we know that you could pay more for something that would improve efficiency or throughput or performance because in the long run that would pay off. And going back to the car analogy, when is the last time you bought a car and didn’t pay any attention to the fuel economy on it? It’s hard to do that without a little bit more accounting elegance.

Bryan Stern, Gasbarre

So, you have to look at the cash flow problem, do something like a net present value approach. And when you start looking at the operating cost savings, the efficiency improvements, and then a huge one that people miss is in the single-chamber batch furnaces we’re heating it up and down. That’s aggressive thermal shock and cycling. A lot of design goes into trying to get components to last because there’s thermal ratcheting and things wear out super quickly. For these continuous systems that are just sitting at temperature, that goes away for the most part.

They’re still consumable products, but the maintenance costs are dramatically improved, and you can talk to people who are using the systems. But again, that’s not something a lot of people have experienced, and it’s hard to quantify. So, if you just look at the upfront costs then it’s easy to miss out. You’re looking for an aggressive payback because you’re just hoping it’s going to cover the operating and maintenance expenses versus actually factoring those in and saying that those overall for the project life are going to increase value.

Limitations and Benefits of Isolated Heat (00:34:09)

Doug Glenn: That makes sense. Two final questions for you here: Are there any types of companies out there where it doesn’t make sense to use an isolated heat type system, whether it be a double chamber or continuous or whatever? And are you seeing, from the activity of , any industries that really should be looking at them?

Bryan Stern: Answering your first question with regards to the limitations, there are a couple situations where you’re not going to want to be looking at isolated heat.

One of those is really large parts. If an individual part is going to take up your whole work zone, then you’re not going to be able to decrease the load size and go to continuous and match the throughput. So, very large batch applications are going to be an obstacle; large parts are one area that it’s not going to shine. We’re seeing the 36” x 36” x 48” work zone is the practical cutoff. Another is the ability to use work TCs to monitor internal temperatures of the parts. That’s possible with continuous equipment. You can do a data pack and record temperatures, but it’s certainly not as convenient. So, when it comes to R&D, validating internal temperatures, and processes that require that, that’s another hurdle and limitation of this type of system.

The footprint is another one due to a second chamber for a batch style process is probably going to be larger in the space that it occupies because you’re not getting smaller in the work zone. So, it’s a question of whether you have the floor space, and do the other benefits of that system make up for the space it’s going to take up?

Doug Glenn: Those are good caveats. How about industries that you’re seeing who really should be adopting these things that either are or ought to be?

Bryan Stern: I don’t think it’s super industry specific, but there are some processes that benefit. And just a couple would be anything with a really short cycle time, because the dead time is going to consume more of the process.

If you can eliminate that and you only need to be at temperature for a little piece of time, then getting the rest of that dead time to be in parallel with the process to increase your throughput makes you a great candidate. But on the other hand, long processes are also a good candidate. If you’re holding it at temperature for a long period of time, boosting that efficiency while you’re in temperature, and better matching a power supply to what you’re doing.

So, good candidates could have short or long cycle times, involve any processes that require tight control, or benefit from isolating them from the space. Censoring can be a good candidate for rising carbon trading, where you can now actually have a dedicated space that maybe even operates at a higher vacuum level for whatever you’re trying to do, or you’re not worried about contaminating the parts with whatever process we’re running, or you need a tight time control. So, gas processes like that.

Oil quenching is an obvious candidate because you already have two chambers most of the time and isolating it, maintaining it at temperature, and keeping it clean from any oil vapors makes it a great example.

For anything with expensive parts, you can minimize the risk by decreasing the load size instead of having a many thousand-pound load where if something goes wrong, you’ve lost it. And especially for applications where that can be a really expensive thing if something goes wrong, you’d rather have it go wrong with much less material at risk.

Doug Glenn: I would think traceability is also probably easier in one sense. With this isolated heat system; you don’t have a huge batch in there. You’re processing potentially smaller batches, and you’re able to isolate which batches are at what temperature or what kind of quench they go through. Those may be some advantages.

Bryan Stern: You had a very specific application for a client who was concerned with a lot of small parts and traceability down to each part, and we’re looking at that system. Anytime you have a high volume of work, if you’re looking at multiple batch, single-chamber batch furnaces to meet throughput, that’s one of the biggest indicators you really should probably be looking, or at least considering, these other systems. And any time you have a lot of small parts in baskets, a large single-chamber batch furnace with stacked baskets of tiny parts, you’ll probably have a lot of benefit.

Doug Glenn: I assume that if somebody is looking at purchasing multiple single-chamber furnaces, you guys would have some sort of a calculator to help them assess if it makes sense financially and process-wise to go with six batch furnaces or one continuous. Is that a safe assumption?

Bryan Stern: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite parts of the process is to take a specific application, go through and break it down, and put together that full project ROI where you’re actually starting to assemble what are we looking at for maintenance costs? What is it going to cost to operate? And now you’re starting to see at a project level, not just the upfront cost, which option is going to be best. And it is so application specific. It’s kind of neat to walk through that with a client and see what comes out the other end. Because at the end of the day, you want what the best solution is. It could be this or that. But when you can actually put that picture together for a process and assist someone with picking the best equipment for what they need for their process, that’s fun.

Doug Glenn: And just for the listener’s benefit, because we haven’t done a lot of talking about your company Gasbarre Thermal Processing Systems. You guys can provide either the isolated heat systems or, if you do the calculations on your handy dandy spreadsheet and it turns out they’re better doing the standard single chamber, you guys can do those, too. So, it’s not like you’re going to push one over the other but whatever makes sense. Right?

Bryan Stern: I see that as a huge advantage. You’re not going to get a bias of us at Gasbarre trying to push you into this because it is what we’re selling. We are able to wade through that decision with the client and help pick the equipment that’s best for them.

Doug Glenn: Helping them make a better choice, super, Bryan. Thank you.

About the Expert

Bryan Stern is the product development manager at Gasbarre Thermal Processing Systems. He has been involved in the development of vacuum furnace systems for the past 8 years and is passionate about technical education and bringing value to the end-user. Bryan holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Natural Science from Covenant College. In addition to being a member of ASM, ASME, and a former committee member for NFPA, Bryan is a graduate of the MTI YES program and recognized in Heat Treat Today’s 40 Under 40 Class of 2020.

Contact Bryan at bstern@gasbarre.com or go to gasbarre.com.

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Heat Treat Radio #110: Isolated Heat, the Future of Vacuum Furnaces Read More »

Heat Treat Radio #109: Making the Switch: Converting In-House Heat Treat Operations to Electric

May 30, 2024 / ALLOY FABRICATIONS TECHNICAL CONTENT, HEAT TREAT RADIO

Electrification is afoot and is claimed to be a more sustainable heating source than natural gas. Art Moslow, electrification project manager at Kanthal Heating Systems, discusses challenges and options when switching heat treat operations from gas-fired to electric with Doug Glenn, Heat Treat Today publisher.

Below, you can watch the video, listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or read an edited transcript.

HTT · Heat Treat Radio #109 – Making the Switch: Converting In-House Heat Treat Operations to Electric

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Kanthal® and Electrification (00:00)

Doug Glenn: I’d like to introduce today, Arthur (Art) Moslow. Art is with Kanthal Heating Systems, and Art, first off, welcome to Heat Treat Radio.

Art Moslow: Thanks for having me.

Doug Glenn: Art, just to give people a sense of your background, you are currently an engineering and communications professional for Kanthal, but you’ve been with them for 20+ years. And, I think, electrification project manager for Kanthal Heating Systems is where you are.

Art Moslow: That’s correct, Doug, for a little over 22+ years with Kanthal.

Doug Glenn: Great, that’s good.

I’ve got a few questions for you. One of them is: Is Kanthal seeing a lot more inquiries now about electrification than they have had in the past?

Art Moslow: It is a significant increase. And I just want to say thank you for the opportunity to meet with you, Doug, and discuss this — what would be viewed as a very important topic.

Over the years, Kanthal has assisted many companies and industries with the exploration and implementation of gas to electric conversions.

Initially, it was a demand from “heavy industry.” That’s kind of an industrial term that means very large projects in the steel and petrol chemical industries, and they’re typically looking for megawatts of power, which is a lot of power.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a significant increase from other industries like air pollution control, calcination, and heat treating.

Pit furnace with Kanthal® Super heating elements
Source: Kanthal

Heat treating represents a great opportunity for converting from gas to electric. A lot of furnaces have indirect-fired gas burners, heating tubes that then heat the furnace — so it’s radiant heat — and it’s primarily a big form of heat transfer for electric heating.

Kanthal has formed, in the last year and a half, a new group. It’s a global group within our company of sales engineers to assist all our different sales areas with gas to electric conversions. We saw that as a significant need. Our sales area and our clients were looking for more support. That’s the group that I head at Kanthal.

Doug Glenn: I assume, if they formed this group, activity is up.

The bulk of our audience are captive heat treaters, manufacturers who do their own in-house heat treating/thermal processing of some sort. What are some of the issues that they’re facing regarding decarbonization?

Art Moslow: Well, a lot of companies have global initiatives for sustainability. It’s not just an individual location, it’s more of a corporate initiative. Every facility, every location, is looking to contribute to their corporate goals of sustainability. We see in a lot of industries that a lot of furnace production or heat processing contributes significantly to CO₂ emissions.

A lot of these companies have multiple furnaces at each location, and an ideal way to reduce their CO₂ emissions is by converting from gas to electric. It’s something they can contribute to their corporate goals and objectives.

Electric Incentivization and Utility Companies (05:05)

Doug Glenn: Would you say the bulk of the activity that you’re seeing is being driven by regulation or by efficiency improvements? What’s the motivation?

Art Moslow: I’m not really a regulations expert, but there are a lot of local regulations where companies are being incentivized a little bit. In fact, there are some government agencies in the U.S. that are incentivizing clients to switch from gas to electric.

We have worked with utility companies — this is a little bit new for us — coordinating with utility companies that are incentivizing their clients to use electricity. The utility company wants to sell more electricity — they have a sales team — and so they work with their customers to help offset some costs to modify the furnace and upgrade furnaces to electric.

Doug Glenn: It is odd about the utilities. I’ve had experience with a number of utilities that are involved with the Industrial Heating Equipment Association (IHEA). They even have programs to help you reduce the amount of electricity that you use. Even though they are the sellers of electricity and they want you to use more, they actually are concerned with people being more efficient because they can’t take the load. The amount of electricity that’s being required these days is amazing.

Your point is good: Utilities are, in fact, providing incentives to companies to help them electrify.

Art Moslow: They provide incentives. A few of the utility companies that we have contact with have test labs where they’ll test equipment to prove out a solution to see if it’s something they can provide to multiple industries.

They might have a test unit to invite their customers to view it.

They’ll help source clean energy too. It’s always important when you’re converting from gas to electric, not just to shift the carbon footprint somewhere else by using “non-clean” energy — you’re just shifting it to another location, and you’re not really contributing.

Utility companies will help to source clean energy. So, when you’re converting from gas to electric, you’re reducing your CO₂ footprint, and the utility companies providing you with clean energy help reduce the CO₂ emissions.

Obstacles to Electrification (07:56)

Doug Glenn: For these manufacturers who have their own in-house thermal processing or heat treating, what are some of the major obstacles that they must overcome in order to get to a point where they can potentially be converting from gas to electric?

Art Moslow: A lot has to deal with challenges related to the idea of change. How can Kanthal really help and assist our clients to change?

You know, gas-fired systems work. We’re not coming in to say, “This doesn’t work, switch to electricity.” That’s not what we’re promoting. What you have does work.

It’s thinking of how we can improve the idea of sustainability and reduce CO₂ emissions. We can help you do that, and it’s up to Kanthal to explain that and overcome those kinds of challenges. We prove to a client that this technology does work, and it doesn’t impact your furnace process. Switching from gas to electric does not mean now you have to make all these modifications to your furnace and your whole production process to achieve the same product yield or outcome of the production process. You don’t have to do that.

Doug Glenn: Does Kanthal help companies do an assessment of the cost-benefit analysis?

Art Moslow: Yes, we do. A lot of times, there are a lot of steps involved to convert from gas to electric. Even to present a client with an electric solution, we have to do a lot of background work like that to analyze their furnace process, to calculate the amount of power, in terms of kilowatts or watts, that is needed to energize their furnace and achieve their desired outcomes.

It’s not a simple action of plugging into an equation, hit an equal sign, and all of a sudden you have a number; there’s a lot that has to be done. And that’s what Kanthal does.

We run a lot of calculations, and then present that information to the client. That’s part of it: we want to show the return on your investment.

False Assumptions about Electrification (10:41)

Doug Glenn: Art, are there any fallacies or false assumptions that you guys tend to find you run into regularly that need to be addressed? If so, what are they and what do you say to them?

Art Moslow says: “The main challenge to overcome is proving how an electric heating system can achieve the same outcome as a gas-fired system, no matter what type of form of heat transfer.”

Art Moslow: Again, it’s going back to the challenge to change. The main challenge to overcome is proving how an electric heating system can achieve the same outcome as a gas-fired system, no matter what type of form of heat transfer. This includes radiant-type heating or even simulating a direct-fired burner. With the latter, you have all the convection, so it’s just the flame with the heat being transferred via air circulation; so, you can do the same process with electric heating.

Doug Glenn: I’ve heard some people have been concerned about the temperature range of electric versus gas-fired or the atmosphere in which the process is taking place and the sensitivity of electric elements versus gas-fired, and things of that sort. Can you address that?

Art Moslow: I would say temperature and atmosphere and heat-up rates — a lot of that contributes to the demands of the heating system.

For electric heating, you have very low temperature — a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit up to probably a little over 350 degrees Fahrenheit. You can cover that entire temperature range with electric heating, whether it’s a metallic alloy that goes up to a certain temperature range, and then we have ceramic-type heaters like silicone carbide glow bars, molybdenum disilicide Kanthal Super. You cover the entire temperature range with electric heating. Then, you can use those materials in different modes of heat transfer.

You have different modes of heat transfer for gas; you can do the same thing for electricity when it comes to radiant-type heating (convective or conduction). A lot of times, it’s a combination of more than one of those types.

It’s up to Kanthal to assist the client and help them select the right alloy or the right material. Some materials are better suited than others in different atmospheres.
Art Moslow, Kanthal

When it comes to atmospheres, there are a lot of different atmospheres other than just air. There’s nitrogen, hydrogen, there’s carburizing furnaces. There are all different types of atmospheres that need to be controlled within a furnace. Electric heating elements can operate under all of those conditions.

It’s up to Kanthal to assist the client and help them select the right alloy or the right material. Some materials are better suited than others in different atmospheres. It’s just ensuring that you’re using the best fit for that atmosphere.

Doug Glenn: I assume that Kanthal’s elements can also go inside of tubes, if they need a protective tube of some sort.

Art Moslow: Oh, yes. In a lot of heat treat furnaces (if it’s a gas-fired system), the gas burner is firing into a tube and the tube is radiating into the chamber, and that’s what’s generating the heat.

We have a few different types of heating elements that you can use when replacing the burner with an electric heating element right inside the tube. It’s the same mode of heat transfer and provides a high-power output.

You’re not really modifying the furnace that much in terms of its process and its temperature profile. You’re just replacing the heat source with an electric heat source.

Doug Glenn: Right, a burner with a heating element.

Preparing to Electrify (16:28)

Tell me, Art, what question does a manufacturer, who currently has a gas-fired furnace, need to ask to start preparing if they want to electrify?

Art Moslow: Typically, when we’re working with a client or manufacturer and helping them on this journey (converting from gas to electric), we put the process into four really basic steps.

Billets preheating in an electric walking beam furnace
Source: Kanthal

The first two are, kind of, the most important to prove a system solution. It involves calculating the power required, converting the BTUs to kilowatts.

As I said earlier, we’ll collaborate with our clients to do that, and it’s much more than just “crunching the numbers.” You really want to analyze the furnace process. You’re getting a full view of the “as is” state. What are they currently doing? What are they processing? What temperatures are they going to?

Perhaps we even do some analysis of the furnace. For example, you’re taking the temperature of the casing. Does the client want to make any process improvements? Is it time to replace some of the insulation? Can we make some recommendations to improve the efficiency of the furnace? We’ll also do a lot of thermal dynamic calculations and then provide that information to the client. This is, kind of, the expectation to achieve your throughput in the furnace or the specific heat-up. Whether it’s a batch furnace where you’re loading a product, heating it up, cooling it down, and then pulling it out, or if it’s continuous.

So, there are a lot of questions that we ask and a lot of analysis that we do. Then, we communicate that back to the client. It’s all presented to them — this is what we would propose.

After that, the next step is designing the heating system. I mentioned earlier that Kanthal has a very wide range, when it comes to temperatures and materials. There are times when an overlap of multiple solutions might work in a furnace, and it’s up to Kanthal to recommend solutions for clients. We’ll lay out: this is the ideal solution, this is why, and this is the payback.

We offer (that is, some clients ask for) CFD modeling (computational fluid dynamics). So, you’re mapping out the solution using a computer. It helps to reinforce the solution to lay it out for a client so they can see it before any kind of decision is made. They might have some feedback as to — oh, we see that this is possible; is there anything more we can do in the furnace?

A lot of times we see that a furnace is originally built for a certain process and a certain temperature, and, over the years, it changes. You want to get more and more use out of your furnace, so maybe you’re pushing the temperature higher than it was designed to, or you’re trying to increase your throughput. You’re putting more product through and pulling more out. So, maybe there’s a chance to do that even more, when converting to electric.

Instead of buying new furnaces or more furnaces, maybe you can get more out of your existing equipment. That’s where CFD modeling helps, as well. It helps us to really present everything to the client.

The last two steps are really specific to a furnace. It’s about removing the existing gas system, removing the gas train, which can improve the safety of the facility.

Typically, gas burners are very loud. We’ve had clients comment, “We don’t even notice that the furnace is on, if we don’t look at the temperature controller,” because there is no more noise when you’re running electricity.

All of that is specific to a client’s furnace.

The last step is installing the electric heating system.

Timeframe for Electrification (21:19)

Doug Glenn: This is a loaded question, and I’m sure it varies widely, but can you give an example of the timeframe that it would take to convert any type of furnace? Maybe one Kanthal have done in the past? There are a lot of batch furnaces that our listeners would use; there’s also a lot of continuous. And, of course, the size of each of those is going to make a huge difference.

Can you give the listeners a sense of how long it is going to take for this process to convert?

Art Moslow: Typically, the first couple steps take a couple of weeks. There is a lot of communication back and forth between the client and Kanthal. We’re gathering information, so we might have to visit a couple of times, and also coordinate with their utility’s supplier. Does the facility have the electric power available? How can they source it to get it to the facility?

Then, there are other components that are needed to electrify a furnace, like the electrical control system.

We have partners (other suppliers) that we know and work with who are very familiar with supplying controls to the appropriate type of heating system.

Different alloys and different materials behave differently when it comes to electric heating. Some controls require current-limit settings, some transformers, some don’t, so there are suppliers out there that are familiar with the requirements.

Different alloys and different materials behave differently when it comes to electric heating. Some controls require current-limit settings, some transformers, some don’t, so there are suppliers out there that are familiar with the requirements.
Art Moslow, Kanthal

Doug Glenn: And you work with them.

Art Moslow: We do. Typically, we work with them, we provide the client with recommendations, saying, “This is what you need.”

Kanthal doesn’t supply control systems. We do, for a couple of our products, because they’re unique, but we tend to work with other partners to do that.

The entire process could take a couple of months. Procuring and manufacturing all of the components is the longest part of the process.

Doug Glenn: As I said, it’s a loaded question because I’m quite sure it’s very dependent upon the process that the client is running, how long it’s going to take to validate the conversion, and whether or not your CFD modeling and things of that sort to really convince people that this does work.

Art Moslow: What is the size of the equipment, too? It’s not just the furnace.

And we want to fit it into the client’s timeline. When is their shutdown? To do a conversion, you can’t just do that overnight. The furnace must be shut down for a given amount of time to do a conversion.

When Not to Electrify (24:26)

Doug Glenn: This is a question where you have to be really honest: Are there times when people should not electrify? Are there instances out there where it just doesn’t make sense?

Art Moslow: There are times where a client might have a furnace that’s quite old, and the cost to convert doesn’t make sense. They really need to rebuild the entire furnace because the insulation is old and losing its integrity, and there’s too much heat loss from that. And the size of the system to try and fit an electric system into a given space just might not work.

We haven’t really seen the process like that other than when the client has a used furnace that they’ve been running. It doesn’t quite match the process they’re trying to run, but it’s a furnace that they had, so they just keep running it. It just makes sense and is more cost effective to replace the furnace with an electric furnace.

Doug Glenn: Are you finding that there are certain U.S. geographies where it’s much harder to get people to convert to electric simply because of the disparity between gas prices and electric prices, or does it almost always make sense to at least investigate it pretty much everywhere?

Art Moslow: You know, Doug, if you asked me that 5–10 years ago, I would’ve said yes, without hesitating. But I would not say the majority of our clients are in “this” geography or in “that” region of the U.S. It’s beyond the point of just looking at the cost of gas and electricity — it’s well beyond that now.

There are a lot of strong arguments about the CO₂ emissions reduction, safety, and environmental aspects and benefits when it comes to sustainability that are really being driven at a corporate level now, especially in the U.S., which is a newer trend.

Doug Glenn: Yes, it is. As everybody knows, we tend to lag behind Europe in these things. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that is the case.

Maintenance of Electrical Equipment (27:19)

I want to back up a little bit on the equipment and ask you a question about maintenance. Because one of the advantages, I have heard, is that there is potentially a significant advantage with maintenance and upkeep of electrical equipment versus combustion equipment.

As you mentioned, combustion tends to be pretty loud; that’s because you’ve got blowers spinning at who knows how many RPMs. You’ve got air piping, you’ve got gas piping, you’ve got mixtures, and all that stuff.

Can you address any major maintenance issues with electrical systems?

Hot rolling at Kanthal in Hallstahammar, Sweden
Source: Kanthal

Art Moslow: There are a lot of systems — like the example you brought up earlier, where you asked the question of if it is possible to put a heating element inside of a tube. For that type of solution, we have a proprietary alloy tube that Kanthal manufactures that goes to very high temperatures. We also sell an applicable heating element made out of the same material that’s designed for use inside the tube.

Typically, when you put in tubes, you’re isolating the atmosphere inside the furnace, and you put a heating element inside the tube. Inside the tube, it’s just air, so it’s very easy to replace the heating element when an issue like that comes up.

You do your safety “tag out/lock out” procedures; you secure power to the elements, and you disconnect them; you can pull them out, you can handle them when they’re hot, provided you’re following proper safety procedures; most, if not all, electric heating elements can be installed while the furnace is still hot; you don’t have to worry about thermal shock or overheating them; and they can be connected and run right away.

Most elements, too, you can mix old and new elements without an issue; there is no performance degradation with the older elements or the new element.

Doug Glenn: So, maintenance, generally speaking, seems to be a bit easier with electric.

Art Moslow: Yes. It’s easy to store a spare element; it’s easy to replace one. And, typically, we’re shooting for life that’s measured in years when it comes to electric heating systems. That’s our objective when designing a solution.

Sustainable Technologies (29:57)

Doug Glenn: Alright, coming down the homestretch here. There have been a lot of improvements in technologies over the last several decades to help with sustainability and things of that sort. Are there any newer technologies, materials, processes that you would like to mention that might be of interest to our in-house heat treat or thermal process people, when it comes to sustainability?

Art Moslow: When it comes to sustainability and ensuring that we’re meeting the demands of industry, in the advertisement, you had indicated that at Kanthal we do spend a lot of resources on R&D to continuously improve our materials to come up with new materials within a product — a grade perhaps, like new grades of moly disillicide Kanthal Super materials that meet the demands of the industry.

We’ve seen an increase in demand for hydrogen atmosphere furnaces and nitrogen. So, we’re constantly developing new materials to meet the demands of industry.

Art discusses the improvements being made to sustainable technologies, such as improvements to materials that are being used for hearing elements.

A newer product that we have, too, we call a Kanthal airflow heater. It’s a very high temperature air heater that’s on the market now that can be used in a lot of different industries.

There are a lot of newer applications that we’re looking into. We’ve seen clients wanting to duplicate or mimic the performance of a direct-fired gas burner. It’s just a flame-firing heat — it’s all convective heat — into a combustion chamber. We’ve had some applications for clients wanting to duplicate that using electric heating.

Doug Glenn: Do you know the temperature range on that?

Art Moslow: I can list it in degrees Centigrade: it goes up to about 1100/1200°C.

Doug Glenn: Any other new technologies or processes?

Art Moslow: No, that’s it. There are a lot of newer materials. It’s always really pushing the materials that we have on the market — so looking for higher temperatures, higher power outlets.

Final Thoughts on Electrification (32:49)

Doug Glenn: Last thing: Is there anything else for manufacturers who have their own in-house thermal processing or heat treating? Any other encouragements or thoughts you’d like to share with them, when it comes to sustainability in the conversion from gas to electric?

Art Moslow: Keep in mind that you can convert from gas to electric. And Kanthal can help you do that. We can assist you and collaborate with you to analyze your process and come up with recommendations.

Doug Glenn: This is a “tack on” question, here at the end: Is Kanthal involved, in any way, with reliability of the power grid? Are they doing anything to help? It’s outside the scope of Kanthal — I realize you are manufacturers — but the reliability of electricity is a critical thing for people to convert, and I’m just wondering if Kanthal is doing anything to help utilities make that supply of electricity more reliable.

Art Moslow: Kanthal is involved with providing heating systems to various industries that are making clean energy, like the solar industry and wind turbines.

There are companies looking at energy storage. In the past, that was really more of a theoretical-type idea as to how to come up with an ideal energy storage-type application, but there are increasingly more companies looking at, exploring, developing, and improving technologies that work.

Doug Glenn: Art, thank you very much, I appreciate it and appreciate your time.

Art Moslow: Thank you for having me, Doug.

About the Expert

Arthur (Art) Moslow is an engineering and communications professional, working as the electrification project manager at Kanthal Heating Systems for the past year. He has been with Kanthal for over 20 years serving in various sales and product engineering roles. He received his Bachelor of Engineering in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from State University of New York Maritime College.

Contact Art at arthur.moslow@kanthal.com or go to www.kanthal.com.

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