Galvanizing and annealing lines typically involve the thermal preparation and application of various zinc coatings on a thin strip of various metal alloys.

Solution heat treatment is common in the production of many aluminum parts to ensure each product’s final characteristics. In the past, through-process profiling systems featured disposable fiber insulations, which were both time consuming and costly to replace.

Designed with your aluminum solution reheat process in mind, our team has developed the Datapaq Furnace Tracker Sealed Quench System, enabling you to create complete temperature profiles without interrupting your process. Unlike past systems, this through-process system does not use disposable insulation to make data collection easier than ever.

This robust furnace tracking solution enables you to measure temperatures (up to 20 points) on the product and across every production cycle – from solution treatment and quenching to the final aging process. This detailed look at temperature data ensures process engineers that every step of the heat treatment process has been set up correctly and that the final product meets both quality standards and industry regulations.

Every Datapaq Furnace Tracker System also includes intuitive software and analytics that can help optimize furnace conditions and track long-term furnace performance trends.

Aluminum brazing requires extreme precision to ensure every product is brazed correctly without deformations. Additionally, when manufacturing heat exchanges like oil and water coolers for the automotive industry, temperatures need to be closely monitored during every step of production to confirm they stay within narrow process window parameters.

For controlled atmosphere brazing (CAB) application specifically, making sure that the aggressive atmosphere from this process does not come into contact with thermal barrier is critical in avoiding any temperature monitoring-related problems. The Datapaq CAB Furnace Solution, for example, helps fine-tune your process to confirm it is meeting the narrow time and temperature window brazing requires.

In vacuum brazing applications, meanwhile, outgassing is a typical problem caused by traditional thermal barrier designs. As a result, Fluke Process Instruments has developed an innovative thermal barrier design that can provide two-stage thermal protection for processes up to four hours and enables users to fine tune heater panel settings during the process and see results in real-time.

Whether your process relies on controlled atmosphere brazing of vacuum brazing, our Datapaq solution can help optimize your process.

In a blast furnace, iron ores are converted into liquid iron inside a large refractory-lined steel vessel. Raw materials (iron ore, coke, limestone), plus sintered products, are fed into the top of the furnace and very hot air is blown into the bottom.

The raw materials can take several hours to convert into molten iron and slag, and are drawn off periodically by drilling into a clay plug in the refractory lining and transferring to the next stage, via transportable ladles (torpedo cars). Hot dirty gases from the top of the blast furnace are cleaned and cooled to be used for burning in the hot stoves to heat the incoming "cold blast". The gases are injected into the bottom of the furnace by a number of tuyeres (large cast copper, water-cooled injectors), installed around the circumference of the blast furnace.

Forging is the transformation of metals or alloys under pressure between two tools. Applications include forging of steel in hot forging temperatures from 950-1250°C (1742-2282°F), warm forging 750-950°C (1382-1752°F) and cold forging up to 150°C (302°F).

This application involves the manufacturing of 3 piece metal cans used for food and other consumer packaging solutions. As part of the process, the can body needs to be coated to provide both physical protection and cosmetic quality. The can body requires an internal lacquer coating to create a barrier between the metal and can contents to ensure food safety and prevent damage to the packaging. The external can surface needs a decorative coating to provide product identity/branding and a decorative finish. Both coating processes require controlled thermal curing of large tin plate sheets, performed in a specifically designed Wicket oven. As part of the can assembly process, curing of lacquer applied to the welded side seam is performed in a separate side seam / side stripe oven.

In aluminum processing applications, monitoring temperature is key when controlling the reheat and homogenization processes. By ensuring temperatures are within set parameters, you can guarantee that your products are both reaching critical temperature points and holding at that temperature for the correct time.

To help optimize this process, Fluke Process Instruments has developed a through-process solution to ensure that your furnace and process are always working within optimal ranges for aluminum production. The Datapaq® Furnace Tracker Thermal Profiling System is compatible with pusher, walking beam and batch furnaces, and enables users to see temperature data in real-time.

Vacuum heat treatment is required when the presence of Oxygen leads to surface degradation for the producing being processed, such as steel and aluminum. In these applications, however, maintaining temperature uniformity throughout the entire vacuum furnace’s working volume is critical to product quality but difficult to achieve.

Because of this, as well as conflicting features found in vacuum heat treating, regular temperature uniformity surveys need to be performed.

To measure temperature data quickly and easily, Fluke Process Instruments has developed the Datapaq® Furnace Tracker Vacuum Heat Treatment, complete with data logger, intuitive software, calibrated thermocouples and our widest selection of thermal barriers.

Vacuum carburizing is an alternative that is growing in popularity compared to traditional case hardening processes. This process is used to produce a wide range of parts – particularly for the automotive industry – and features advantages like good case-depth uniformity and fast carbon transfer. Using multi-chamber systems like this enable high throughput but measuring temperature uniformity or product temperature profiles requires a through-process temperature profiling system like the Datapaq Furnace Tracker System from Fluke Process Instruments.

Throughout tube and pipe mills, induction welding is commonly used while producing steel tubes and temperature control is key in maintaining or improving product quality. Four different welding processes are typically used – high frequency welding, electric resistance welding, gas tungsten arc welding and laser welding – and measuring the temperature of each weld is also critical in achieving the highest quality product at the highest speeds, all while ensuring the lowest possible energy costs.

To better understand the full intricacies of your process, Fluke Process Instruments has developed a range of fixed infrared monitoring tools and through-process thermal profiling systems to help your facility improve tube quality and reduce downtime.