Jun 11 2007
When Leading Edge, of Decatur, IL, a state of the art design firm with manufacturing capability, was asked by its major railway customers to consider providing manganese steel rails, they came to Engineered Production Systems (EPS) for a heat processing solution.
Leading Edge proposed to load 20 tons of cast rails in a furnace with a manipulator, and take them to a temperature of 1900 deg. F through programmed steps. Once the required soak time at 1900 was complete, they needed to withdraw the rails and transfer them into a quench bath in under 2 minutes. With their manipulator, and the EPS furnace design, they expect to accomplish this transfer in under 1 minute. These steps give the rails the needed strength and ductility.
EPS proposed a system of replaceable castable pillars on the floor of the furnace chamber to support the load, and provided a total of 24 Eclipse TA025 burners, with 12 firing high on one side and 12 firing low on the other, to create the needed circulation and uniformity. The furnace body was designed to tip up in clamshell fashion, allowing the customers manipulator to bring the rails in from the side, and then unload them from the same side at the completion of the heat cycle for transfer to the quench tank. All aspects of the furnace design, and interfacing with the customer's manipulator, were handled through a Honeywell HC900 hybrid programming controller with internal PLC.