As vehicle platforms adopt more high-strength and alloy steels, automotive suppliers must support tougher heat treatment cycles without sacrificing volume. One US plant producing gears, shafts and drivetrain components discovered that its aging box-type furnace was a serious obstacle to both material upgrades and volume growth.

Bottleneck symptoms: new steel grades, old furnace limits

When the plant began testing new alloy steels specified by its OEM customer, the limitations of the old furnace quickly appeared:

• Insufficient temperature headroom and uniformity near the upper limit, making it risky to run demanding 1100°C cycles.

• Inconsistent results with larger loads, as batch size increased to meet higher volume targets.

• Frequent adjustments and trial runs whenever a new recipe was introduced, consuming valuable engineering and production time.

It became clear that the box-type heat treatment furnace was not just old—it was structurally unsuited to the emerging mix of alloys and volumes.

1100°C Tube Type Heat Treatment Furnace: built for alloy steels and high volume

The plant replaced the legacy system with a Tube Type Heat Treatment Furnace rated at 580kW with a maximum operating temperature of 1100°C. Key features included:

• Multi-zone tube design, providing precise temperature control along the furnace for complex alloy cycles.

• Robust capacity and loading configuration, allowing higher volumes of alloy steel parts to be processed with consistent results.

• Flexible control system, supporting multiple heat treatment recipes and quick switching between product families.

With this new furnace, the plant could confidently run more aggressive austenitizing and tempering cycles for modern steels while maintaining repeatability.

Outcome: precision heat treating without sacrificing volume

After ramp-up, the US auto parts plant achieved:

• Stable, repeatable heat treatment results for advanced alloy steels, meeting OEM specifications without constant tweaking.

• Higher overall throughput, since larger loads could be processed reliably in each cycle.

• A removed bottleneck, freeing engineering and sales to pursue new programs that require more demanding metallurgical performance.

By replacing an obsolete box-type furnace with a 1100°C Tube Type Heat Treatment Furnace, the plant turned a technical constraint into a competitive advantage in the alloy steel era.