Keeping Consistency on Heat Treating
With Solar Atmospheres serving a variety of different markets, the company must follow several different quality system standards. Keeping up with the quality standards takes a lot of hard work and patience. The ultimate goal is to meet customer requirements pertaining to quality and delivery.
To that end, Solar Atmospheres tailors their vacuum furnace equipment, and processes, around their customers' needs for better repeatability and reduction of process variation. In addition, capacity becomes part of this equation, and as such Solar Atmospheres is in the process of adding more vacuum furnace capacity with the purchase of at least two new furnaces in the near future. Adding capacity, along with ever improved vacuum furnace technology, enables Solar Atmospheres to meet quality and delivery requirements while building long lasting relationships with customers.
One such customer account involves vacuum heat treating of investment castings. Since 1998, Solar Atmospheres has performed vacuum heat treating for this customer on a day-to-day basis. The relationship has grown through the communication and feedback process, improving over the years and providing enhanced, customer-specific services.
In this case, Solar's customer provides enough material to keep two furnaces running 24/7. Currently, Solar Atmospheres has four vacuum furnaces that are modified and qualified to maintain the required throughput; this includes three HL 50 and one HL 36 vacuum furnaces. The investment castings currently run in two batches, with each batch weighing approximately 325 pounds. Solar Atmospheres is in the process of developing new inspection formats, fixturing, and process adjustments to eventually run three batches at a time. This will give the customer more throughput in the same time period while maximizing the equipment and reducing cost.
Solar Atmospheres has over 12 different sizes of vacuum furnace, enabling us to deliver custom-tailored processing, with precise atmosphere and temperature controls, for the right size parts at competitive prices. All furnaces have the same basic temperature and atmosphere capabilities meaning we can move a process from one furnace to the next with as little variation as possible.
Solar Atmospheres is committed to enhancing customer relationships by continually striving to improve vacuum processing technology and quality, while assuring capacity exists to service our customers' on-time delivery requirements.
