Founded in 1968, the Heat Treatment Lab of Centro Sviluppo Materiali S.p.A. may be considered as the starting point for all the developments carried out on alloys research for what regards chemical and physical metallurgy of materials and processes.
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The set of furnaces deployed in the laboratory placed in Rome allows the selection of the temperature-time cycles able to maximize the mechanical features of the material and give them the best microstructure so steering the process towards solutions guaranteeing the highest possible performance for the material.
The Lab is equipped with six muffle furnaces; two of them can reach the maximum temperature of 1300 °C allowed by two silicon carbide heating elements. The remaining four furnaces temperature may reach 1050°C. Their heating-up speed ranges in between 200¸300 °C/h, whereas the closed-furnace cooling-down velocity falls within 60 ¸ 80°C/h.
The Lab is equipped with facilities to carry out water, waterquench and oil quench treatments, followed by forced air cooling on small-sized samples if reuired.
The temperature evolution is collected by thermocouples. At the moment the temperature trends are recorded on paper sheets: future implementations of the acquisition system will allow the electronic treatment of the signals by means of a 4-channel data-logger.