Loos uses a pure-hydrogen atmosphere for the annealing of stainless and nickel-alloy cables and components. They supply products to companies such as Boeing, General Dynamics and Bombardier. These products are used in aerospace, military and commercial applications, including aircraft flight controls, elevators, fitness equipment, and rigging and scaffolding operations. Loos manufactures a wide variety of wire, aircraft cable and wire rope. ![]() Today, the company can draw wire, strand cable, extrude plastics, design and manufacture hardware and tools for mechanical cable, custom design and manufacture cable assemblies, and test and package all of the above. Since 1971, the garage-sized business has developed into a 220,000-square-foot manufacturing plant. Gus Loos grew his cable and extrusion business into a vertically integrated manufacturer of wire, cable, extruded cable, cable assemblies and associated tools and fittings. By eliminating hydrogen storage, on-site, zero-inventory hydrogen generation eases the challenge of employing hydrogen in thermal processing.įig. Because of hydrogen’s extremely wide flammability envelope, low initiation energy and absence of odor or other indication that the gas is present, important safeguards are required when storing and using hydrogen. HOGEN on-site hydrogen generators offer a convenient, reliable, cost-effective approach to providing small- to medium-sized hydrogen supplies with virtually zero hydrogen inventory. Processors tailor the atmosphere composition to provide the performance desired, for the processes performed, at the lowest atmosphere cost possible. Synthetic (custom-blended) atmospheres comprised of blended, dry inert gases – such as argon or nitrogen plus hydrogen for oxygen removal – provide a flexible, reliable, high-performance atmosphere for thermal processing. In most cases, processors want the driest atmosphere possible, and they will humidify to controlled levels if they want to achieve specific processing results. It is critical that thermal-processing atmospheres have controlled humidity. In the case of sintering, the resulting parts may be entirely unusable. The metal oxides created are very undesirable qualities. Liberated oxygen can then react with the material being processed or with heated areas of the furnace (furnace belts and hot zones are often affected). The use of hydrogen to act as an oxygen “scrubber” has long been best practice for high-temperature metals processing.Īt the extremely high temperatures common in many types of thermal processing, atmospheric moisture will break down to oxygen and hydrogen constituents. ![]() While the use of nitrogen blanketing can reduce oxygen levels sufficiently to prevent undesirable reactions under many conditions, the high temperatures and open design of most heat-treat furnaces make it necessary to go beyond a simple nitrogen atmosphere. Because oxidation is generally not a desirable process condition, heat-treat conditions are generally adjusted to exclude oxygen, either by use of vacuum heat treating or by using an atmosphere furnace that contains an atmosphere designed to eliminate oxygen.įor atmosphere furnaces, it is generally not sufficient to use a nitrogen-only atmosphere for heat treating. If metals are heated in an oxygen-containing atmosphere, oxidation is unavoidable. In the case of sintering and hermetic sealing, manufacturers can create products with entirely novel capabilities that may not be possible with other fabrication approaches.īecause high temperatures speed up most reactions and because oxygen is present in the atmosphere surrounding us, high-temperature processing is normally done in a manner that excludes atmospheric oxygen. By skillful use of various heat-treating techniques, manufacturers can tailor metal properties such as ductility and hardness to the specific requirements of the intended application. High temperatures cause metals to go through phase transformations that change their characteristics. Whether the specific technique used is heat treating, brazing, annealing, sintering or hermetic sealing, high-temperature atmosphere processing enables manufacturers to provide the exact product characteristics required by their customers. High-temperature furnace-atmosphere processing is an important technology in fabricating metal parts.
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