Alloy trays and fixtures are integral components in a heat treat operation. Maintaining furnace equipment and alloy trays and fixtures functionality are essential to maximizing the heat treat operation throughput. This paper will discuss and present practical guidelines for periodic inspection and monitoring of alloy trays and fixtures in support of minimizing potential tray and fixture material handling issues and maximizing heat treat operation productivity and throughput.

Heat-treatment simulation is a powerful tool for gear design and process troubleshooting, but many times the predicted gear distortion is difficult to compare to physical gear measurements and to required specification charts or measurements. To help ease this burden, two software programs are utilized to provide powerful gear analyses to heat-treatment simulation results. This paper briefly describes the software used, DANTE and Integrated Gear Design (IGD), and presents a simple case study. The stress and deformation from the heat treatment of a small gear made of SAE 10B22 are predicted using DANTE. The distorted gear geometry is then imported into IGD and the predicted distortion is compared to the actual measurements of the gear.

Eddy current is a non-destructive testing technique proven for use in heat treat and material structure verification. Modern multi-frequency eddy current instruments can test for conditions such as misplaced case, shallow case, short heat, short quench, and delayed quench. Eddy current testing offers many benefits over traditional heat treat validation methods. Unlike sample testing processes using cut, polish, etch, and visual inspection techniques, eddy current testing provides a clean, fast, and repeatable process that can perform in-line inspections of all parts produced. Eddy current inspections have traditionally focused on symmetrical parts such as wheel bearings and gears. However, advances in robotics have paved the way for cost-effective inspection of non-symmetrical, complex components that would have previously required multiple test stations. Robotics also provides a low-cost way to retest, null, and periodically proof the testing process using multiple conditions of masters. This has been difficult and expensive with other types of automation and operator involvement.