A half century ago (back in the early 1960’s) a lot of research work was done by The American Welding Society (AWS) Committee on Brazing and Soldering to determine appropriate criteria for brazing lap joints (the preferred type of joint design for assemblies requiring the ability to withstand high pressure in service, such as gas bottles, etc.). The results were published in their committee report: AWS C3.1 in 1963, one of the recommendations of which was that joints should have an overlap of 3T or more, where “T” is the thickness of the thinner of the two sheet metal pieces being brazing together.

Here’s how that recommendation came about.  The AWS C3 committee arranged to conduct a series of round-robin testing in ten different laboratories around the country, using two different shear-type joint designs, four different base metals, and three different types of brazing filler metals (BFMs), for a total of about 1200 brazed shear test specimens.  Their intent was not only to find out what constituted a satisfactory joint overlap design for brazing, but also to develop an easily reproducible test specimen that was “realistic” to the real-life world of brazed components in industry and which could become a “standard” that everyone could (and would) use to evaluate joint strength. by Dan Kay

Experiments were conducted using three-step preparation procedures for titanium and its alloys.  For CP titanium and alpha-titanium alloys, use of an attack-polishing agent in the third step was required to obtain good results.  The experiments defined optimum surfaces for each step and operating conditions.  Two-phase, α-ß alloy specimens are significantly easier to prepare than a single-phase α specimen. The method does yield perfect polarized light response with α-phase alloys, such as commercial-purity titanium.

Titanium and its alloys have become quite important commercially over the past fifty years due to their low density, good strength-to-weight ratio, excellent corrosion resistance and good mechanical properties.  On the negative side, the alloys are expensive to produce. Titanium, like iron, is allotropic and this produces many heat treatment similarities with steels.  Moreover, the influences of alloying elements are assessed in like manner regarding their ability to stabilize the low temperature phase, alpha, or the high temperature phase, beta.  Like steels, Ti and its alloys are generally characterized by their stable room temperature phases – alpha alloys, alpha-beta alloys and beta alloys, but with two additional categories: near alpha and near beta. By George Vander Voort

The movement of gases is an important and interesting subject but one often dismissed as a topic best left to scientists. However, the Heat Treater needs to know something about the basic nature (theory) of gases and in particular how they behave in vacuum. The main difficulty is that too much theory tends to become a distraction. Our focus here will be to better understand what goes on inside a vacuum furnace.

One definition of a gas is that it is simply a collection of molecules in constant motion (Fig. 2). The higher the temperature, the faster these molecules move, and as one might expect, the motion of gas molecules stops or dramatically slows down at or near absolute zero (0°K). As molecules speed up with an increase in temperature, there is an increase in their kinetic energy (or energy of motion). Molecular collisions occur between molecules and if contained, these molecular collisions against the walls of their container result in a pressure rise (which always occurs in a closed container when a gas is heated). In other words, pressure is simply the force per unit area that a gas exerts on the walls of its container. By Dan Herring

Highly distortion prone gearing (Fig. 1) was the subject of an investigation into the dimensional changes which result from utilizing either oil or high pressure gas quenching following a low pressure vacuum carburizing process. For comparative purposes, the gears in question were also atmosphere gas carburized and plug quenched, which is standard practice for these geometries. Full production loads (Fig. 2) were run using two (2) different carburizing methods (atmosphere, vacuum) in combination with free quenching in either oil at 75°C (165°F) or high pressure gas (nitrogen) at 11 bar.

Gears were taken from multiple locations throughout each load for analysis. Parts for metallurgical evaluation were selected from the center of each load. Multiple areas on each part were then analyzed for microstructure, case depth, and hardness (surface, profile, core). Dimensional checks (out of round, gear tooth profiles) were conducted on the gears before and after heat treatment. For brevity, only a portion of the complete test program is presented here (see Reference 4 for more detail). By Dan Herring

The Edwards “RV” (simply meaning Rotary Vane) laboratory sized oil sealed rotary vane vacuum pumps have been in the market for 21 years. They have a very unique design with no equal.

This article will attempt to show the reasons for its design and introduction in 1993 and then explain the features of the vacuum pump that make it one of the best small vacuum pumps available today. This is not an official Edwards account, although the engineering related content is based on Edwards information, it contains my personal knowledge, experience and understanding from working with these pumps for many years. By Howard Tring

Over the years it has shown that the best surface for brazing, generally speaking, is the “as-received” (as-rolled, as-drawn, as-machined, etc.) surface roughness of the material coming into the brazing shop.  An illustration of what this surface roughness might look like, under high magnification, is shown in Fig. 1.

Surface roughness obviously increases the total surface area of each faying surface inside the joint, when compared to a flat, polished surface.  And, due to this “roughness”, it can be seen that there are many capillary paths for brazing filler metal (BFM) to follow between all the valleys and “peaks” on that roughened surface. by Dan Kay

Formation of martensite in fine-grained steels is probably the most common goal in heat treatment of components. The carbon content of the parent austenite phase determines whether lath (low-carbon) or plate (high-carbon) martensite, or mixtures of the two will be produced, assuming the quench rate and steel hardenability are adequate for full hardening. Lath martensite produces higher toughness and ductility, but lower strengths, while plate martensite produces much higher strength, but may be rather brittle and non-ductile.

For a given alloy content, as the carbon content of the austenite increases, the martensite start, M_s, temperature and the martensite finish, M_f, temperature will be depressed which results in incomplete conversion of austenite to martensite. When this happens retained austenite, which may be either extremely detrimental or desirable under certain conditions, is observed.  The amount of retained austenite present depends upon the amount of carbon that can be dissolved in the parent austenite phase and the magnitude of the suppression of the M_s and M_f temperatures. This paper examines the conditions under which austenite is retained and the problems associated with it presence, with detecting it and with measuring it. By George Vander Voort

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In many vacuum brazing applications, it is deemed necessary to use an atmosphere gas inside the vacuum furnace, perhaps to quench components following a vacuum-brazing run, or to perhaps build up a partial-pressure atmosphere inside the furnace to prevent the outgassing/volatilization of higher vapor-pressure metals, or perhaps merely to allow gaseous conduction of heat from part to part being brazed.

Whenever a gas is introduced into a vacuum furnace for a brazing operation, I’m always very concerned about the dewpoint of that gas, since dewpoint represents moisture in the gas, and moisture represents the presence of oxygen.  In vacuum brazing of aluminum, moisture molecules present their own issues to the brazing process, in addition to their oxidizing characteristics. by Dan Kay