What is Heat Treatment and How to Measure its Final Results?

An image of a Heat Treatment Process used on a metallic component. Image source: (1)

For companies and industries that deal with metallic structures or components like: gas piping, automotive parts, material-testing, building infrastructure, etc.

Many metallic industrial & engineering materials, are usually modified by a metallurgy process known as heat treatment, which toughens up the treated materials to withstand specific operational conditions while improving its useful-life.

Heat treatment is the process of exposing a mechanical or metallic parts to mild and/or extreme temperature of heat and/or cooling environments. This allows the user to change the items’ physical and mechanical properties; sometimes its shape too. (2)

Although the heat treatment process is mostly used to harden a metallic material to increase its hardness strength. Other properties like its: shape, formability, springiness, malleability, etc. can also be altered, treated & mended until the wanted result is achieved; however, this happens only during its hardening process.

How can we measure the end-result of the component’s hardness, to check if it has achieved the desired result?

A Portable Hardness Tester - TIME5350 Portable Hardness Tester.

Obsnap Instruments has a Portable Hardness Tester known as the TIME5350 Portable Hardness Tester.

Based on the testing principle of the Leeb rebound hardness test method, the TIME5330 portable hardness tester can test the hardness of various types of metals and alloys, fast, conveniently and on-the-go.

Below are the types of metal and alloys that can be tested with the TIME5350:

Steel, cast steel, alloyed steel, stainless steel, grey cast iron, nodular cast iron, cast aluminium alloy, copper zinc alloy (brass), copper tin alloy (bronze), pure copper, forging steel, etc.

John from Proheat Treatment Precision Sdn Bhd, is testing the TIME5350 on an old steel block to check its hardness level.

The steel block that John tested on, gave a measurement 57.9 HRC upon the first-try.

For product specification, click on the following link:  http://www.obsnapinstrument.com/index.php?ws=showproducts&products_id=687149&cat=Material-Testing&subcat=Non-destructive-Testing-System-Hardness-Tester#openproducts

External sources:

(1) Heat Treatment Process to Forge Metallic components image by Simufact Engineering.

(2) Definition of Heat Treatment by Bright Hub Engineering – What is Heat Treatment?

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Obsnap Instruments Sdn Bhd (599642-A) specialises in providing total solution with distributing Metrological, Material Testing & Analytical instruments, locally and abroad. (http://www.obsnapinstrument.com/)