High pressure gas quenching - Technical and economical considerations

With the increasing restrictions on effluents, alternatives to oil quenching for the hardening of automotive and other large scale production components need to be considered and developed. Gas quenching is one such alternative, but up to now, has not experienced wide spread implementation. Several issues restricting introduction of this technology are the effective cooling rates that can be expected, capital costs of the quench chamber and gas recovery equipment and the processing costs involved. It has been shown that high pressure helium quenching has the capacity to replace quenching oils, even fast quenching oils, when high pressure, 20 bar and above are used. An economic model for gas quenching will be presented and applied to the case of continuous carburizing. Variables taken into account are the initial investment costs and the production costs for oil quenching and gas quenching cases. Thus, an economic comparison of cost for oil and gas quenching can be made.