Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge TN
Forging Industry Association, Cleveland OH
Komtek, Worcester MA
Northeastern University, Boston MA
Queen City Forging, Cincinnati OH

Goal:

• Increase the energy efficiency of preheating and post-process heating of
  aluminum billets for the forging industry.
• Attain extensive grain refinement through rapid heating.
• Establish improvement in mechanical properties produced by the grain refinement attained.

Development:

• Optimized combination of radiant and convective heating resulted in rapid and efficient
  heating of billets, increasing production rate by a factor of 4.
• An order of magnitude faster heating in a hybrid infrared furnace produced finer grains
  as compared to conventional furnace.
• Extensive grain refinement resulted in enhancement of fatigue properties. Infrared preheated
  and forged components were proven to survive two times longer than conventionally
  preheated forgings.

Benefits:

• Overall efficiency of the hybrid infrared furnace is about 30% (Conventional gas-fired
  furnace is about 10% efficient).
• Rapid infrared heating drastically reduces the preheating time for billets (Conventional
  6 hrs; Infrared 18 minutes per unit billet).
• It also improves energy efficiency of heat treating aluminum parts (Conventional
  heat-treating furnaces take 10hrs; Infrared takes ~ 1hr per unit billet).
• Estimated potential national energy savings up to 0.8 Trillion BTU/year for Aluminum.

Applications:

Various thermal processes - Annealing, Stress Relieving, Preheating and post weld annealing during Joining, Preheating prior to extrusion, forging and other similar forming processes.

Heating materials other than Aluminum - Steel, Brasses and Bronzes, Titanium alloys, Nickel and Cobalt-based alloys.

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Research and Development Sponsored by
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy,
Industrial Technologies Program, Supporting Industries