TPT January 2010

H eat and S urface T reatments

Speciality metal plant adds vacuum annealing furnace has operations in 12 states and 15 countries. After designing the first commercial pressurised water reactor nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957, Westinghouse and its licensees provided more than 40% of the world’s 434 operating commercial nuclear plants.

Westinghouse Specialty Metals Plant in Pennsylvania, USA, has purchased a high vacuum retort annealing furnace to process zirconium tubes. Westinghouse is increasing its plant capacity to meet the needs of customers in both China and the United States. The vacuum annealing furnace is custom engineered to meet the tight uniformity standard of ±5°F in the 48" x 6" x 216" hot zone. The furnace is rated for 1,200°F and will be equipped with a cold cap high vacuum diffusion pump. Westinghouse Electric Company offers a wide range of nuclear plant products and services to utilities throughout the world, including fuel, service and maintenance, instrumentation and control, and advanced nuclear plant designs. With headquarters in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, Westinghouse

side of the E-Stik and touches the contacts to a work surface. The temperature is instantly displayed on the digital display located on the top of the unit. Multiple measurements are made by simply moving the contact point to another area. The E-Stik is constructed of durable thermal plastics, with an integrated safety shield that slides over the thermocouples when the unit is not in use. Tempil – USA Fax: +1 908 757 9273 Seco/Warwick manufactures industrial heat processing equipment including heat treat furnaces, vacuum furnace technology, atmosphere generators and aluminium reverb melting and holding systems. The company provides heat treating equipment and services worldwide for customers involved with primary aluminium, aluminium recycling, automotive, aerospace, com- mercial heat treating, HVAC, electronics, lighting, medical equipment, nuclear applications and high temperature sintering. Seco/Warwick Corporation – USA Fax: +1 814 724 1407 Email: info@secowarwick.com Website: www.secowarwick.com Westinghouse Electric Company – USA Website: www.westinghousenuclear.com to use a graphite furnace. This saves time with the analysis, the cost of investing in a furnace system and the ongoing costs of running a furnace system. The ContrAA offers fast multi-element analysis, since all atomic lines are available from the single lamp. There is no need to switch between lamps for each element and wait for individual lamps to warm up and stabilise. Analytik Jena – UK Fax: +44 208 429 7539 Email: sales@aj-uk.co.uk Website: www.analytikjenauk.co.uk Email: tempil@tempil.com Website: www.tempil.com

Seco/Warwick’s vacuum team custom engineers vacuum furnaces for most processes, including hardening, tempering, annealing, solution heat treating, brazing, sintering, carburising, carbon/carbon composites, CVD–graphitising, high pressure quench and degassing. The company has entered into a strategic alliance agreement with Retech Systems LLC, offering advanced technology for VIM, VAR, electron beam and plasma arc furnaces, along with powder production and environmental remediation equipment.

Electronic temperature indicator

Tempil, USA, has introduced an electronic contact temperature indicator that provides an instantaneous digital readout of surface temperature at the point of contact. It is not necessary to know the emissivity of the surface material to obtain an accurate reading.

Developed by Tempil for critical temperature measurement applications, the patented E-Stik design combines the latest in micro, thermocouple technology

with a bold digital readout to instantly display the surface temperature with an accuracy of ±1%. The new technology provides high accuracy and

consistency of surface temperature measurement of ridged, polished or non- polished surfaces. Designed to easily fit into a pocket, the Tempil E-Stik is quick and easy to use. The user simply activates the I/O switch on the

Tempil’s E-Stik temperature indicator

1,000 high-resolution continuum AA spectrophotometers sold

Analytik Jena has reported sales of over 1,000 units of its ContrAA range of flame and graphite furnace AA spectrophotometers. The ContrAA is a high-resolution spectrometer that allows the user to select background correction points from the spectra at any wavelength. This gives true- simultaneous optical background correction with no false positive or negative errors. The spectrometer uses a high-powered xenon lamp as the source for all AA analytical lines between 185nm and 900nm. This eliminates the need to buy a new lamp for each element of interest and also reduces the running costs.

The lamp source allows access to all available lines at the same intensity. This means that using secondary lines is now a realistic way of measuring high levels of analyte without the need for dilution, and makes uniform sample preparation for multi element methods possible. It also opens the possibility of using molecular absorption lines such as SC for the determination of non-metals such as sulphur or halogens. The company states that the high- resolution ContrAA offers better detection limits on all elements by factors between 3 and 7. In many cases this allows the use of the flame for analysis rather than having

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J anuary 2010

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