HICON/H₂ bell annealer for steel wire

HICON/H₂ bell annealer for steel wire coils, bunch coils or spools.

HICON/H₂ bell annealer technology distinguishes itself in quality and offers cost advantages in heat treating hot-rolled and drawn bunch wire coils.

It provides the most cost-effective process for soft annealing, recrystallizing and spheroidizing various steel wire grades, compared with the other heat treatment facilities currently available, since very different grades can be annealed in a single charge.

In every case, the materials must meet the high speeds and high degree of automation demanded by processing machines. This means that the highest uniformity of mechanical properties and surface finish conditions must be achieved over the entire length of wire, both to improve processing speeds and to increase the durability of the machinery.

Continuous development ensures market leadership.

The metallically-tight workload space allows the safe use hydrogen as a process gas. This allows drawn or descaled wire coils to be bright annealed, which in turn creates significant advantages in downstream processing steps. Pickling times can be significantly reduced or even eliminated completely. Depending on the material being processed, other process atmospheres such as nitrogen (used for scaled surfaces, to avoid decarburization), argon and mixed gases can also be used.

Reproducible high quality by virtue of precise temperature control without overheating, resulting in:

• uniform microstructure and mechanical values, improved ductility (e.g. cold-heading grades, ball bearing steels etc.)
• nearly 100 % carbide spheroidization

Thanks to the extremely low dewpoint, the metallically encapsulated workbase achieves the following

• Oxide-free, clean wire surface
• No decarburization

The facility can be implemented to comply with the standards required by the automotive industry, in accordance with CQI-9 (AIAG).

Applications

Cold-drawn or hot-rolled wire, such as:

• Construction steels
• Chain steels, spring steels
• Non-alloyed and low-alloyed grades of cold-work tool steel (ball bearing steels, etc.)
• Low and high-alloy hot-work tool steel and high-speed steels (HSS)
• High-alloy stainless Cr steels

It is also possible to heat treat wire with a non-circular cross-section (flat wire), as well as pieces/parts in charge baskets.

Workload space dimensions

Diameters up to 4900 mm and stacking heights up to 6000 mm, with gross charge weights of up to 90 t when processing multiple stacks.