voestalpine Tubulars GmbH & Co KG based in Kindberg-Aumühl, Styria, Austria, has successfully commissioned a new heat treatment line and a hot tube straightening machine supplied by SMS group. The line is designed for seamless tubes with outside diameters between 60.3 and 273.0 millimeters. It can process steel grades with alloying contents of up to approx. 20 percent.
The heat treatment line supplied by SMS group consists of a walking beam type austenitizing furnace, an SMS Quenching Head, a cooling table for normalizing, a tempering furnace, also of walking beam design, a cooling bed and two sawing stations for sample cutting. This equipment allows voestalpine Tubulars to perform various different heat treatments such as quenching, tempering, and normalizing in one single line.
The heat treatment line can handle tubes with wall thicknesses of up to 25 millimeters. The line is designed to be expanded by an additional quenching unit at a later stage in order to process tubes with wall thicknesses greater than 30 millimeters.