EoW July 2013

26 / 84

July 2013 24
News
Technology
Plasmait has introduced a new PlasmaAnnealer for fine and
small diameter stainless steel and nickel alloy wire.
The annealer can be used for small cross-section round, flat and
shaped wire as well as for fine ropes and tubes made of stainless
steel and nickel alloys.
This new concept allows for a radical increase of continuous
annealing speeds that can surpass 15m/s in the case of fine wire
sizes of austenitic stainless steels.
With such speeds annealing can be performed in-line with
drawing or rolling, substituting multiple lines of a traditional
tube furnace.
The annealer features compact design, high energy conversion
efficiency, and very low gas consumption, and gives the
operator the ability to target mechanical properties with a great
degree of accuracy.
Rapid heating and reduced time of recrystallisation result in fine
grain size with uniform crystal structure.
The PlasmaAnnealer can cold start production in a few minutes
and can be stopped quickly. This avoids the lengthy heating-up
and cooling-down times and associated energy costs that are
symptomatic of a conventional furnace.
Ion sputtering on the material surface results in fine dry surface
cleaning and surface oxide removal, which have proved
beneficial to applications with demanding surface requirements.
High-speed trials on the new line can be performed at Plasmait’s
facility in Austria.
The annealer can process different type of materials used in
applications such as: fine wire for mesh and textile, filter wire,
EMS mesh wire, electronics resistance wires, heating element
wires, copper clad steel and copper clad aluminium wires, as
well as wires, ropes and tubes for medical, jewellery, aerospace
and similar applications.
Plasmait GmbH – Austria
Website :
New PlasmaAnnealer for fine
stainless steel and nickel alloy wire
▲ ▲ The new annealer from Plasmait