Equipment for heat treatment of railway wagon chassis castings

The equipment is designed as an automated line consisting of following parts: 

• tunnel car hearth annealing furnace
• cooling chamber
• furnace transport cars with supporting beams for casting loading
• track for furnace car transport through the line in a closed cycle
• mechanisms for movement of cars through the furnace, cooling chamber and on the reverse track
• car transverse transport at the furnace inlet and at the cooling chamber outlet

Line accessories includes complete electric equipment for feeding of all drives of mechanical and hydraulic equipment, fans, control elements actuators, heating process control system and automated line logical control system.

Optional accessories:

• system for tracing of the charge flow with output of heat treatment protocols of each piece, including monitoring of possible correction annealing of castings (e.g. after casting repair)
• utilization of waste heat from charge cooling for auxiliary heating of the production hall
• waste gas and cooling air exhaust system, including stack

Maximal temperature in furnace is limited with the value of 1,000^oC. Annealing temperature is set acc. to the user production engineer’s requirements, usually for normalization at soaking to approx. 900 to 980^oC.

In cooling chamber, the castings are cooled from the annealing temperature to the temperature of casting discharging from the line of approx. 170°C. The cooling intensity is controllable.

Modular system of the line allows designing the line for various hourly outputs; lowest recommended output is approx.  4 t/hr.

The line is designed for automated operation with minimisation of operator’s interventions. Operator provides only:

• attendance of the line and supervision of the furnace operation via HMI and control system,
• check and evidence of castings to be treated
• printing and verifying of heat treatment protocols
• loading and unloading of castings for heat treatment and confirmation of charge readiness for heat treatment on the car (stop of loading onto the transport car)

Due to considerable exclusion of the human factor, the equipment guarantees an excellent reproducibility of the heat process and the heat treatment results conform to the exacting requirements of the appropriate standards for the railway wagon structural parts.