R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services

Having a full-fledged R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services department is highly unusual for a commercial heat treating company, and is a great value-added asset for both Solar Atmospheres and its customers.  Solar’s R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services group is managed by their Corporate Metallurgist, who is supported by a degreed Project Engineer and a dedicated technician.  Additionally, a PhD Metallurgical consultant and PhD Chemical consultant are on staff and available as needed.  Further, Solar Atmospheres has a fully equipped, on-site, metallurgical laboratory for complete evaluations of any heat treated materials.

To be a heat treatment company of the highest standard requires a thorough understanding of the behavior of metals under thermal processing, since nearly all metal parts get heat treated at some point during their manufacture.  Having an R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services Group trained in the Science of Metals and Metallurgical Engineering is a resource that Solar Atmospheres and its customers can rely on for support and assistance in dealing with metallurgical questions and problems.     

Properties required of metals vary widely depending on the application.  The desired property may be strictly physical in nature, such as electrical resistivity or magnetic permeability.  Other applications may be primarily concerned with mechanical properties, such as strength and fatigue resistance.  Most often, a combination of properties is required, such as wear and corrosion resistance, as would be expected of any good quality knife blade.  Common to R&D Metallurgical engineering services, there are generally trade-offs between desirable and undesirable property attributes of an engineered system.  Regarding metallurgy and material properties, heat treating may degrade one desired property while trying to enhance another desired property; for example, loss of ductility and toughness while trying to increase the strength or hardness.  Herein lays the value of Solar’s R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services, as they have the experience and knowledge to optimize heat treatment processes to obtain the “best set” of desired material properties.

Solar Atmospheres has always been considered a "high-end" heat treatment facility, meaning that the products heat-treated tend to be of the highest quality.  This fact further supports the value of Solar’s R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services Group because high quality parts are used in the most demanding and critical applications and selecting the correct heat treatment for the optimum "set" of properties is essential for each application.  Examples of demanding and critical applications include: gas turbine engine blades, race-car engine parts, biometallic medical implants such as knee and hip replacement parts and coronary stents, as well as the many surgical instruments used to perform medical procedures.  As the examples indicate, high quality service must be an integral part of all of Solar Atmospheres' operations, and the R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services Group “engineers quality” into every new process developed. 

Combining a broad range of application experience in the metals industry, Solar’s R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services Group can readily address customers' questions pertaining to materials selection and proper heat treatment for the end product’s application.  The company’s R&D Metallurgical Engineering Services Group provides a value-added service because they know why particular alloys are chosen for a given application, and they know how to best heat treat the materials to obtain the optimum desired metallurgical properties for the application.  This resource provides customers with a comfortable feeling that they have sound, experienced metallurgical engineering servicesknowledge working for them.