EoW July 2013

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. New PlasmaAnnealer for fine stainless steel and nickel alloy wire

Plasmait GmbH – Austria Website : www.plasmait.com

▲ ▲ The new annealer from Plasmait

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July 2013