The heat treatment of stainless steel plates requires the use of a continuous heat treatment furnace. The function of this equipment is to perform rolling heating in the furnace on the stainless steel plates that need to be normalized and tempered, so as to achieve the purposes of quenching, tempering, annealing, etc.

The main equipment of the continuous heat treatment production line includes roller conveyor trolleys, furnace input rollers, roller hearth heat treatment furnaces, connecting rollers, roller quenching machines and other devices.

The purpose of heat treatment is to produce stainless steel plates with high tensile strength, high yield point, corrosion resistance and wear resistance.

The heat treatment of stainless steel plates mainly consists of three stages: heating, insulation and cooling. Different heating temperatures and cooling rates can be used according to different purposes. Three processes commonly used in the heat treatment of medium and thick plates include normalizing, annealing and quenching and tempering.

Normalizing is a heat treatment process in which the stainless steel plate is heated to a temperature of about 30-50°C above the upper critical point A3 to austenitize the stainless steel structure, and after uniform insulation, it is cooled in the natural atmosphere to obtain a pearlite structure. Normalizing can refine grains, uniform metallographic structure, increase impact resistance and elongation, and remove rolling internal stress.

The annealing process is to heat the stainless steel plate to a certain temperature above or below the critical point Acl, hold it for a corresponding time, and then slowly cool it to achieve a structural heat treatment process that is close to an equilibrium state.

The quenching and tempering treatment of stainless steel plates is quenching and high-temperature tempering, or medium-temperature tempering, or normalizing and combined heat treatment. Its purpose is to enable the stainless steel plates to obtain better overall performance.

Quenching is to heat the stainless steel plate to above Ac3, then rapidly cool it at a cooling rate greater than the critical cooling rate after heat preservation, thereby transforming the supercooled austenite structure into a martensite structure.

Tempering treatment is to heat the stainless steel plate to a temperature below the Ac1 point, keep it warm and then cool it to room temperature. The purpose of tempering is mainly to remove the internal stress formed during quenching and hot rolling, and to improve the plasticity and toughness of the stainless steel plate. Tempering includes three types of tempering: low temperature, medium temperature and high temperature.

If you roll an extra-thick stainless steel plate, it must be heat treated after rolling. The reason is to avoid the temperature difference between the surface and center of the stainless steel plate causing cracks. Heat treatment can homogenize the rolling structure and remove hydrogen from the stainless steel plate. composition to avoid the presence of acicular ferrite, which would affect subsequent flaw detection and inspection processes.