Ipsen vacuum furnaces offer a wide variety of roles for heat-treating professionals, most commonly serving up solutions for tempering, annealing, hardening, and brazing. Ipsen customers routinely count on our expertise in building, servicing, troubleshooting, and optimizing our furnaces to ensure maximum uptime and throughput.
But did you know that our expertise extends beyond the most common use cases? Here are a few specialty products that Ipsen has delivered to address customers’ unique needs.
“Competitors have frequently referred customers to Ipsen when they ask for highly customized products that solve specialty needs.”
– Jim Grann, Ipsen Technical Director
Debinding-Sintering (DS) Furnaces
The advances in additive manufacturing – from 3D printing to powdered metal – have made significant impacts on modern manufacturing. Lightweight, incredibly strong and durable metal parts have been developed to take the place of complex machined parts within motors, engines, turbines, and other precision high-temperature applications. By building up material to make parts based on a 3D model one layer at a time, additive manufacturing can dodge several limitations that traditional manufacturing has to deal with.
A significant part of the process has been partnering the additive manufacturing with a furnace that can remove the binding product, while chemically bonding the remaining metallic material to complete the transformation into a solid, hardened and toughened, durable product. Our customers count on Ipsen to provide precise temperature uniformity, while offering a flexible process gas addition package when a process requires it.
Ipsen’s line of DS furnaces are capable of managing the removal of the sintered binding product, while delivering precise heat with industry-leading accuracy to ensure the final product is processed correctly every time.
Acetylene Vacuum Carburizing (AvaC®)
The benefits of carburizing steel have been known for generations – hardening steel parts with lower carbon content to improve its mechanical properties. Surface- or case-hardened steel can allow manufacturers to use a softer steel during the machining process, reducing wear on tooling. The softer steel is easier to machine to tight tolerances, and much less likely to encounter the brittleness of a hardened steel that may result in more scrapped parts.
Prior to the 1960s, carburizing was mainly done exclusively in atmosphere furnaces, but through the 70s and 80s, ultra-high pressure carburizing solutions using methane competed with lower carburizing pressures operating with acetylene as the carbon delivery gas. By the new millennium, low-pressure carburizing using the AvaC® product line was proving to create much cleaner products with 95+ percent uptime, better case depth results and better uniformity.
AvaC® proved exceptionally useful for thermal processors that were delivering parts with increased complexity. As additive manufacturing continues to build new complexities into metal parts, Ipsen’s AvaC® furnaces will find more opportunities to make products more durable and reliable for generations to come.
Aluminum Ion-Vapor Deposition (IVD)
Used in highly-specialized industries, IVD delivers an aluminum coating to parts that may have prolonged exposure to corrosive environments, creating a protective shell that can absorb oxidation while preventing contamination of the layers below. The IVD process provides uniformity and complete coverage that isn’t limited to line of sight – another advantage for thermal processors as parts grow in complexity.
Opting to use aluminum over the previously preferred cadmium coatings allows for higher temperature applications, while also giving operators the ability to use much more environmentally friendly and readily available metals. IVD furnaces have been essential resources for airframe components, aerospace fasteners, and oceanic vessel manufacturers, delivering a coating that can protect underlying metal from rust oxidation that can happen when the metal is scratched or subjected to exposure to water with high saline content.
Niche to Meet You
Though many customers have gotten used to seeing the Ipsen logo in their vacuum furnace department, or at their local commercial heat treaters, these are just a few examples of where you might find Ipsen equipment in an unexpected place.
If you have a niche process for a complex thermal processing or manufacturing problem, contact your Ipsen regional sales representative, or email sales@ipsenusa.com.