Vacuum Furnace - Bionicsro

Vacuum Furnace for Laboratory and Industrial Applications

Laboratory Equipment Manufacturing

Bionics Consortium is a major vacuum heat treatment equipment manufacturer and supplier in India. It sells advanced, efficient devices such as electric vacuum furnaces for laboratory research. The machines come with insulation and gas heating options with imported materials lining the inside chambers and the outside of the furnaces are covered by anti-corrosive paints.

Vacuum furnaces are used in the manufacture of different materials as well as research. They are used for drying biomass, heat treatment of steel alloys, and debinding in powder metallurgy. The vacuum furnace process involves loading components, creating a vacuum inside the chamber, heating parts efficiently, cooling and finishing with inert gases like argon or quenching, and ensuring a system that prevents oxidation or heat loss.

What do you mean by Vacuum furnace?

A vacuum furnace is a type of furnace that works only under vacuum. In other words, this means that whatever is being heated is put in a surrounding devoid of oxygen, lack of any other form of heat loss but most importantly protecting the material from being contaminated elsewhere. At about 3,000 °C (5,432 °F), heat is conducted by certain materials including metals and ceramics. The maximum temperature that the furnace element can attain depends on its melting point as well as saturation vapor pressure. They are standby equipment for processes such as annealing, brazing, sintering, heat treating among others requiring high repeatability and minimum contamination. Controlled atmosphere furnaces are other common names used to refer to them.

On the other hand, vacuum furnace systems have accurate temperature control with an operating temperature range between 1,500F and 5,400F inclusive. Immediate heating results in oxidation which has negative implications on reduced metallic bonds as well as aggravating oxidation; they produce uncontaminated final products without distortions due to atmospheric gases e.g., annealing; brazing; sintering etc.. The heating chamber in vacuum furnaces maintains uniform temperatures at rates between 1,500 degrees F and 5,400 degrees F.

This happens because there is no chance for metal ingredients to get oxidized when their rise in temperature occurs within a short period reflected by the absence of oxygen during this moment.

Temperature regulation
Reduced concentrations of carbon, oxygen, and other gases.
Quicker cooling
Reproducibility of metallurgical results

The benefit is that the process is automated by a computer. Oxygen does not exist in vacuum furnaces, thereby avoiding oxidation that usually takes place when high temperatures are achieved. Special gases including inert gases such as argon are used to return the metal that is treated in the furnace to a different state other than metal state at very high speeds. This should reach the target temperature.

Top Manufacturer and Supplier of Vacuum Furnace

Features of Vacuum Furnace

Temperature Range: 1100°C to 1600°C
Uniform temperature with 5°C
Excellent vacuum flange sealing
High alumina ceramic fiber inner chamber
Programmable temperature controller
Air or water cooled channels

Vacuum furnace components

The components in use for a vacuum furnace can be described as the same as other industrial furnaces or ovens. The main innovation was a pumping arrangement that had been introduced to remove air from the hermetic chamber when heating took place. It includes an airtight furnace chamber, electric heating element, temperature controls, transport apparatus, power supply system, and furnace shell.

Common Applications of Vacuum Furnace

Vacuum furnaces are used in the manufacture of different materials as well as research. They are used for drying biomass, heat treatment of steel alloys, and debinding in powder metallurgy. Heating steel to a defined temperature followed by cooling at high speed is one of the processes that vacuum furnaces are used for. There is also an application for vacuum carburising, where a hot zone is injected with gas at temperatures ranging between 900°C and 1050°C. This process severs carbon and hydrogen, which are then diffused into the surface of the part. Another application for it is debinding when binders get melted or vaporised during the heat treatment cycle. For example, the electronics industry, medicine, crystal growth energy, and the artificial gem industry control the processing of materials at high temperatures.

Designing and Constructing a Vacuum Furnace

To cool the furnace, a nitrogen gas storage tank is necessary for gas-cooled vacuum furnaces, which typically consist of a chamber, vacuum equipment, hydraulics, controls, and cooling components. Before water enters the boiler, it may cause burnout or destruction of seals and electrodes due to water shutting off or low pressure; therefore, there must be provisions for a high headwater tank.

Welding pressing domestic 16-Mn steel plate gives rise to a double-water-jacketed structure on the furnace body door. In this design, rack gear drive opens and closes door drills, so operation is easy and versatile. Such heating chambers contain spherical, made-up graphite tube heaters with cooling gas nozzles angled 360 degrees. Graphite felt flexible paper insulation materials in stators give a lightweight, structurally stable feature.

Taking into account a heating method, vacuum furnaces are subdivided into external and internal heating species, wherein the latter is more common worldwide for the manufacture of vacuum furnaces. Same thinking about structure gives one single chamber, double chamber, three-chamber, and continuous type vacuum furnaces. Also depending on the cooling system, turbines can be gas cooled, oil cooled, or a combination of gas and oil cooled. Nitrogen with an acceptable purity higher than 99.9999% is used for vacuum gas quenching when stainless steel, high alloy die steel, high-speed tool steel, and alloys are to be water-cooled.

Materials used for heating in vacuum furnaces include:

Heating elements of vacuum furnaces are divided into metal heaters and non-metal ones.

There are two types of metal heating elements: the former includes special alloys such as molybdenum, platinum, tungsten, and tantalum, while the latter consists of general alloys like nickel-chromium heat-resistant alloy, iron-chromium aluminium alloy, and molybdenum-tungsten alloy. Materials such as silicon carbide, graphite, molybdenum oxide, and silicides of molybdenum are examples of non-metallic heating elements. The bond in silicon carbide is broken at high temperatures, while molybdenum oxide melts at 1300 °C. It can be seen that among these materials only graphite can be easily machined, possesses high temperature service capability, good non-quenching and heat-treatability features, is ductile, has a large radiation area, and is resistant to thermal shock. It is therefore used as a heating element.

Vacuum Furnace Working Principles

In this case specifically, the vacuum furnace operates by using water as a phase change material for heat exchange. The burning fuel produces heat that is then moved to water, which acts as a heat medium in the system. Once it hits the saturated temperature under the given vacuum condition, it gets heated up until the saturation point, then evaporates into steam, thereby accomplishing phase change of type number one. Condensate will come down into the evaporation chamber, where it must be heated for another phase transition. In addition, there is a combustion chamber with a flue gas outlet at the lower part of the vacuum hot water boiler, the upper part being connected with an extraction device to extract non-condensable gases into the vacuum chamber so as to maintain its stable state, assuring efficient functioning of the U-type exchanger.

Functions of Vacuum Furnaces

The achievement of certain aims by means of heating or cooling materials or objects under processing conditions in vacuum according to specified process regulations is called vacuum quenching (tempering, annealing).

Brazing in vacuum is one of the welding processes by which several weldments are heated to the temperature below the melting point of the basic metal and at or above that of the filler metal. Depending on the material, the process of brazing can usually be observed at high temperatures.

Heat treatment is a vacuum sintering technique in which parts are made by adhesion and diffusion of other grains of metal powder when heated in vacuum.

Vacuum and magnetism are mainly used for meta-materials as well as magnetic treatments.

Hot Zone Material	Maximum Temperature	Typical Applications
Graphite	3,000°C	High temperature sintering, heat treatment
Molybdenum	1,800°C	Powder metallurgy, diffusion bonding
Tantalum	2,500°C	Processing Electronic materials
Tungsten	3,000°C	Sintering and heat treating carbon sensitive materials

Vacuum Furnace Process

The vacuum furnace procedure is concerned with getting many different parts to work harmoniously together in order to build a system that will not allow oxidation or heat loss from the product. Before we delve into this further, here are the steps followed during the vacuum furnace process:

Load the Furnace: The Vacuum furnace heat treatment process begins by placing components on rolling racks or trays or by unrolling parts for models that require it.
Create Vacuum Inside Chamber: This is done by ensuring that a vacuum is created within the chamber, thus starting its pump and sucking out oxygen in order to seal it tightly.
Heat Your Parts: Among other things, vacuum furnace systems feature excellent temperature control as well as speed control when heating various parts, making their overall heating very efficient.
Cooling and Finishing: Gases are used in vacuum furnaces so; therefore, use inert gases like argon since they do not react with them. Another method is quenching which can cool products and reduce production time depending on material type and end use.