What is Induction Heat Treating Equipment?
Induction heat treatment equipment is a surface heat treatment process equipment that generates induced current through induction heating to heat the part of the workpiece. This heat treatment process is often used for metal workpiece surface quenching, but can also be used for partial induction annealing or induction tempering, and sometimes for overall induction quenching and tempering. In the early 1930s, the United States and the Soviet Union began to apply this induction heating method to do the workpiece surface induction hardening jobs. With the development of the industry, the induction heat treating technology has been continuously improved, and the application scope has been continuously expanded.
The complete induction heat treating machine normally includes an Induction heating power supply, a CNC induction hardening tempering machine tool, a closed-loop water cooling system, customized induction heating coils, an energy monitoring device, and other assistive devices as users request. The whole induction heat treating equipment can be used alone or can be applied to the entire automatic production lines.
Why use induction heat treating equipment?
- According to statistics, the power consumption of heat treatment accounted for 25% of the total power consumption of the machinery industry, and the power consumption of induction heat treatment accounted for about 20%~25% of the total power consumption of induction heat treatment equipment. Induction heating can automatically control the whole process of process implementation, avoiding unnecessary waste and consumption of power resources. The efficiency of the induction heat treatment process is improved while the consumption of power resources is reduced.
- The induction heat treatment process is beneficial to speed up heating and improve production efficiency. Since the whole process of heat treatment is completed by induction, the whole induction heat treatment process can be shortened by more than 4 times. It reduces the waste of power resources, accelerates the heating speed of the thermal sensitive heat treatment process, promotes the overall production efficiency, and finally makes the enterprise obtain high profits.
- The induction heat treatment equipment working process is beneficial to realizing production automation. With the close cooperation of induction heating equipment, quenching machine, computer, and other equipment and machines, the production process can be fully automated. At the same time, it can monitor the quenching heating and cooling time, heating speed, quenching machine running speed, quenching medium temperature, and electrical parameters of frequency conversion machine on the whole production line, so as to complete the automation of cold and hot processing continuous production.
- Clean working environment, the deformation of the finished part is smaller.
- The martensite structure of the hardened layer is fine, and hardness, strength, and toughness are higher. After surface quenching, the workpiece surface has larger compressive internal stress, and the workpiece has a higher anti-fatigue breaking ability.
What are induction heat treatment processes?
Zhengzhou KETCHAN’s induction heat treating equipment can be widely used in the different induction heat treatment processes and during the production period, mainly in the following applications.
- Normalizing: This heat treatment process is to heat the steel or steel parts to an appropriate temperature above the critical point Ac3 or Acm and keep them for a certain period of time and then cool them in the air to obtain a pearlite structure.
- Annealing: This heat treatment process of heating the hypereutectoid steel workpiece to 20~40 degrees above AC3, holding it for a period of time, and slowly cooling it with the furnace to below 500 degrees and cooling in air.
- Solution heat treatment: The alloy is heated to a high temperature single-phase region and maintained at a constant temperature so that the excess phase is fully dissolved into the solid solution, and then rapidly cooled to obtain a supersaturated solid solution.
- Hardening: The austenitizing steel is cooled at an appropriate cooling rate so that martensite and other unstable structure transformation can occur in all or a certain range of the workpiece cross section.
- Tempering: An induction heat treatment process in which the quenched workpiece is heated to an appropriate temperature below the critical point AC1 for a certain period of time and then cooled in a suitable way to obtain the desired microstructure and properties.
- Quenching and tempering: It is generally customary to combine the heat treatment of quenching and high temperature tempering as quenching and tempering treatment. Quenching and tempering treatment is widely used in various important structural parts, especially those connecting rods, bolts, gears, and shafts that work under alternating loads. After induction tempering and tempering, tempered soxaustenite structure has better mechanical properties than normalizing soxaustenite with the same hardness.
What are the induction heat treatment equipment applications？
Induction heat treatment equipment has wide applications during industrial production, below are just a part of its applications. For special induction heat treating machine applications, please consult our company’s heat treatment team.
- Auto parts, motorcycle parts, molds, agricultural machinery parts induction quenching treatment.
- Heat treatment of mechanical parts, such as all kinds of gears, sprockets, shafts, spline shafts, pins, and so on.
- Quenching treatment of machine tool guide rail in the machine tool industry.
- Heat treatment of pliers, wrenches, screws, awls, axes, etc.
- Quenching of piston rod, pin, plate pin, valve, fork, etc.
- Sprayberry fastener, spike, etc.
