Category: Blog

April 9-11, 2019, 32nd Annual Conference & National Small Business Exporter Summit. Thermcraft was recognized by NASBITE as an Outstanding Exporter Honoree and Presenter for this event. Thermcraft president, Mr. Tom Crafton, gave a brief presentation explaining how Thermcraft became an exporter and then answered questions from the attendees. It was an honor for Thermcraft to be invited to this event and be recognized as an Outstanding Exporter.

Box furnaces are ubiquitous heat treatment components in laboratory and industrial facilities. They are widely available in floor standing and benchtop variations and are routinely used to treat single products, or individual batches, at temperatures exceeding 1200°C (2192°F). Ceramic insulation is subsequently used to improve thermal uniformity throughout the processing chamber. This offers the added benefit of limiting heat propagation through the chamber walls, which could be damaging to sensitive components. In this blog post, we will explore ceramic insulation for box furnaces in more detail. Ceramic Insulation: Boards and Blankets The two standard variations of ceramic insulation for box…

Laboratory furnaces have proven instrumental in advancing the capabilities of modern electronics. They are key components for generating intermediate materials like single-crystal semiconductor ingots, which are subsequently used in the manufacture of almost all advanced electronic architectures. Capacitors. Diodes. Integrated circuits. Transistors. Each of these fundamental electronic components can be engineered and optimized using semiconducting materials like silicon (Si) and its various compounds. This has facilitated a new generation of high functionality printed circuit and wiring boards (PCB/PWBs), organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), photovoltaic cells, and more. We have reached the current high-technology landscape of electronics using advanced laboratory furnace…

Unfinished metal alloys are subject to a wide range of chemistry-dependant corrosive phenomena that can limit their performance and service longevity. Iron (Fe) particles that are exposed to moisture and oxidation will gradually succumb to rust unless alloyed with sufficient levels of anti-corrosive elements like chromium (Cr) or protected with a veneer or functional coating. Stainless and galvanized steels represent the two primary metal types designed for anti-corrosive properties, but each of these can still submit to more complex corrosive phenomena such as chlorine pitting. Prior to the inception of powder coating ovens, the best way to counteract this was…

On Valentine’s Day, Thermcraft lost its founder, Mr. Morris L. Crafton, at 93. Nearly 50 years ago in January of 1971, Mr. Crafton and his wife Clara, founded Thermcraft on the principal of providing the best customer service available in the thermal processing industry. Born in West Palm Beach, FL, Mr. Crafton’s family later moved to NC where he grew up in the Charlotte area. Mr. Crafton served in the US Navy during WWII. When he returned home he attended Wingate College and earned a degree in mechanical engineering. After college he was called again to serve his country during…

Industrial furnace manufacturers are tasked with developing heat treatment solutions that meet both broad and extremely specialized operating criteria. These may include wide temperature ranges with safety controls for extreme peak thermal conditions, unique considerations for future expansion, and specialist furnace geometries for processing difficult components. Humidity is an almost unavoidable factor in industrial and laboratory heat treatment processes. It is produced when the internal temperature of samples is heated to the extent that moisture trapped within the material desorbs and enters the heat treatment chamber as a vapor. Dehydrating samples is a critical process for drying and curing ovens.…

Standard thermal processing equipment can be limiting in terms of device architecture and geometry. Specialist equipment manufacturers typically require a bespoke solution to guarantee optimal processing conditions for products and components that are chemically-sensitive or of a difficult scale. Custom industrial furnaces enable original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to tailor production lines to their unique thermal processing requirements. Improved automation, controlled environments, and unique accessibility features are just a few challenges that Thermcraft has resolved with our custom industrial furnaces. In a previous blog post, we explored 4 Custom Industrial Furnace Types from Thermcraft. This week, we are exploring two more…

Natural gas furnaces, or gas-fired ovens, use naturally-occurring gaseous mixtures of hydrogen (H) and carbon (C) as the primary source of fuel. These hydrocarbons can be extracted from oil wells where they exist as off-gas, or they may be found in isolated natural gas fields and extracted using specialized drilling rigs. It is a fossil energy source that has more closely aligned with renewables compared to petroleum and coal, owing to its significantly reduced carbon emissions following combustion. As such, natural gas is dispensed to millions of homes around the world where it is used to fuel ovens and central…

One of the most critical steps in semiconductor manufacturing is the introduction of deliberate impurities into the material’s molecular structure, which is known as doping. The unique electrical properties of semiconductors are utterly dependent on the number of free electrons and electron holes available in its atomic bands. Under stable thermal conditions, the concentrations of these are roughly equivalent. Dopants are introduced to increase the conductivity of semiconductors closer to that of a conventional conductor. For example, introducing an impurity such as boron (Bn), gallium (Ga), or phosphorous (P) into a silicon (Si) semiconducting wafer increases the number of free…

Melting furnaces are used to overheat solid materials until they liquefy. Often, thermal processing equipment is used to alter the surface or internal characteristics of materials by carefully elevating their temperature. In the case of metals, this typically increases ductility at the expense of both hardness and strength. This requires an industrial furnace capable of generating and maintaining temperatures below that of the material’s melting point. A melting furnace, by comparison, generates overhot temperatures that exceed the metal’s melting point and cause decomposition of its physical structure which leads to liquefaction. This phase transition is utterly dependent on both temperature…