Safety & Maintenance
Evaluating the Condition of Your Vacuum Furnace: 5-Point Checklist
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btaining precise process and metallurgical results is essential to any heat-treat application. Often, outcomes rely on the performance of a vacuum furnace. When a furnace fails, it leads to unexpected downtime or unplanned expenses. To prevent this costly setback, thermal processing departments should regularly evaluate the condition of their vacuum furnace equipment. Whether you’re in the aerospace, automotive, energy, medical, tool & die, or any other industry, the goal is to keep your furnace running—and performing reliably—for as long as possible. To that end, Ipsen Customer Service offers free evaluations of any brand of vacuum heat-treating system.
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16 IMD MAY 2020
Anyone charged with supervising, operating, or maintaining a vacuum furnace, who is concerned with uptime, should perform the following set of five checks, which closely follow Ipsen’s in-depth evaluation.
1.
Hot Zone
Start with a visual inspection looking for broken or missing hardware, such as gas nozzles, element hangers, insulation retaining hardware, and the hearth assembly. Next, examine the insulation and hot face integrity by checking these three areas:
