Austrian steel pipe producer voestalpine Tubulars GmbH & Co KG recently commissioned a new heat treatment line and a hot tube straightening machine to meet the growing demand from the oil and gas sectors for seamless tubes that can process steel grades with alloying contents of up to approximately 20 percent.
SMS group will supply the line, designed for seamless tubes with outside diameters between 60.3 and 273.0 millimeters and with a capacity of 25 tons per hour. The heat treatment line consists of a walking beam type austenitizing furnace, a quenching head, a cooling table for normalizing, a tempering furnace, also of walking beam design, a cooling bed, and two sawing stations for sample cutting. This equipment allows voestalpine Tubulars to perform various different heat treatments such as quenching, tempering, and normalizing in one single line.
The heat treatment line currently can handle tubes with wall thicknesses of up to 25 millimeters. The fully automatic line is designed to be expanded by an additional quenching unit at a later stage in order to process tubes with wall thicknesses greater than 30 millimeters.
