Advances in Heat Treatment Processing

摘要

Savings in processing time, cost reduction and increased productivity are enabled by tighter control of the gas carburising process. These are the objectives behind the development of CBLite, a new low-cost retrofittable carbon diffusion simulator that readily interfaces with existing controllers/programmers. The opening conference paper Computer Simulation/Monitoring/Control of Gas Carburising, by Arthur Watson (MPC Division, Almor Group, UK) and his company's development partner Nigel Tucker (Heat Treat Solutions, UK), outlined the benefits of this touch-screen microprocessor system that calculates the real-time carbon diffusion curve, as components are being heat treated, based on: actual furnace temperature; actual atmosphere carbon potential (measured by oxygen probe or three-gas infrared analysis); steel specification (from an in-built database of predefined or user-defined materials); atmosphere agitation factor (a "user-friendly" number combining the effective surface reaction rate constant, a function of atmosphere composition, with atmosphere circulation: e.g. 1.00 for a typical sealed-quench furnace using endothermic gas; 2.00 for a fluidised bed).