The efficient and very accurate VertiQuench® furnace is SECO/WARWICK’s response to the growing demands of Automotive and Aerospace Industry heat treating professionals for aluminum solution heat treatment, quench and aging.
The VertiQuench® Drop Bottom furnace provides solution heat treatment followed by quenching and artificial aging for precipitation hardening of products used by Automotive and Aerospace manufacturers. The furnaces can be supplied in one complete system compliant with AMS (Aerospace standards) or CQI-9 (Automotive standards) and fulfill their tight requirements of temperature uniformity, restrictions for processing time in each step and other parameters.
Innovative AMS compliant quenching technology enables very fast and full load immersion within 5 seconds. As the VertiQuench® name implies, the process provides extremely fast vertical quenching. The heat-treated material is dropped into a stationary or movable water or polymer quenching tank located directly under the furnace.
VertiQuench® provides an optimal heat treatment technology for aluminum alloy, extruded and drawn portholes, or seamless tubes of 2xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx series alloys in hard tempers, since it provides the shortest quenching time and produces the highest mechanical properties of treated extrusions. A specially designed security system allows the user to process with AlMg alloys, eliminating the risk of explosion.
The system owes its extremely tight temperature uniformity to proven hot airflow direction design, confirmed by years of laboratory testing and simulations and subsequently in industrial conditions.