Acetylene Vacuum Carburizing

摘要

Almost 30 years has passed since the publication of materials on vacuum carburizing technology, and is attracting a great deal of attention as a technology capable of being used as a substitute for gas carburizing technology. However, the technology was not popular except in specific fields. The main reason for this is due to a variety of harmful influences accompanying the sooting problems caused by CH_4 or C_3H_8. We have succeeded in that the occurrence of sooting was suppressed by utilizing acetylene, at extremely low pressure for carburizing (below 1 kPa). This process is now showing the excellent quality and prospects for this technology in terms of quality, economy and safety. At present almost 70 practical mass production furnaces are used in production lines, in Japan and abroad. At this time, we will report summary of the present acetylene vacuum carburizing process and the actual results obtained by these acetylene vacuum carburizing furnaces for mass production.