Nitriding & Nitrocarburising

Beta Heat Treatment Limited offer a contract heat treatment service to ISO 9001 standard. Components up to 1700mm long, 750mm dia and 2000 kgs in weight are treated up to a maximum temperature of 1100 ⁰C. We have provided a fast, reliable, quality service to the engineering industry since the start of production in March 1989. Beta, the first successful company to use fluidised bed furnaces, is now Europe's largest Fluidised Bed sub contractor and was one of the first Heat Treaters to achieve BS ISO 9001 standard in 2003. The flexibility of the equipment and its accurate temperature control enables Beta to offer the full range of processes with optimum quality. It is probably the cheapest form of tool steel heat treatment due to the longevity and quality of equipment and low energy cost per kilogram. Below are our state of the art laboratory facilities and an example of a uniform compact nitride layer produced by Supa-Fast Nitriding. Note the absence of a “White Layer” which has been removed by a diffusion process at customer request.

·Neutral hardening
·Nitriding & Nitrocarburising
·Stress relieving
·Annealing
·Solution annealing
·age hardening
·Precipitation hardening
·Tempering
·Bright annealing

Beta introduced two new furnaces during 2001. A larger  CTP 75120 fluidised bed furnace, capable of nitriding or  neutral hardening items in excess of 700mm diameter and 1.5 metres long. These also supplement existing equipment where it is dedicated to specific customer products for example Aerospace and Formula One applications

Nitriding and Nitrocarburising are widely used processes which Beta has adapted utilising the advantages of fluidised bed technology manufactured within our own group at Clayton Thermal Processes. We provide a high quality, reliable processes with the advantage of a large reduction in turnround time. Some users still specify process time, ie. 48 or 90 hour treatment. At Beta we ask you to tell us what you want to achieve, tell us the case depth and we will produce what you require in the shortest practical time. Here you can see drawings of equipment installed at Beta

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Nitriding & Nitrocarburising - Flexibility of Fluidised Bed Nitriding

Practically all types of tool steel can be nitrided or nitrocarburised and information for processing them is readily available. Below we have data relating to a series of nitride processes applied to forging dies, a practice not generally recommended, but which has proved to be successful, provided the depth and quality of the layer is tightly controlled.

Using fluidised bed furnaces, samples of hardened and tempered tooling (in the machined and ground state) were nitrided to establish the process parameters to nitride M2 High Speed Steel. The tooling samples were nitrided at 520^oc for varying times and quenched into an ambient fluidised bed under nitrogen atmosphere.

Each sample was checked for: Vickers Hardness using 2, 5, and 10 kg loads, nitride layer depth and surface finish (to achieve a mirror finish after polishing).