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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2013
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 results 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 for
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
types 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