Perfecting Heat Treatment and Endothermic Processing

For iron and steel, one of the most common approaches for hardening these relatively soft materials is to perform heat treatment under endothermic atmospheres.

There are many methods for heat-treating metal alloys, some of which include case-hardening or surface hardening and annealing, but the general purpose of the treatment is to help improve the durability or hardness of the material.

To achieve these improvements in the hardness properties for alloys, heat treatment involves several stages. These are generally divided into annealing, quenching, and tempering. Annealing involves first heating the metal to a given temperature for a certain length of time and then using a controlled rate of cooling. Quenching involves rapid temperature reduction of the material to make the alloy very hard. Often such hardness can lead to brittle materials, so tempering can be used to restore some of the elasticity.

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