Conveyor belt furnaces move in-process workpieces continuously through annealing, brazing, enameling, glass sealing, and hardening stages without requiring human interruption or disrupting heat exposure. With this one piece of equipment, you can streamline your production process to make it faster, smoother, and safer.

At S.M. Engineering & Heat Treating, we’ve been designing, crafting, and building high-quality industrial furnaces since 1958. Today, we’re the world’s finest Annealing Furnace Makers, including custom-built conveyor belt furnaces. We can build the right furnace based on your facility’s specifications and operational requirements with a commitment to producing the highest quality products. Here we will cover the key benefits, features, applications, and processes of our conveyor belt furnaces.

Benefits and Features of Conveyor Belt Furnaces

There are many benefits and features of conveyor belt furnaces, including:

• Easy Maintenance. Conveyor belt furnaces are easy to inspect, maintain, and repair.
• Energy Efficiency. Conveyor belts compact the various heating stages of your production into one fixed location for overall power efficiency and less energy waste.
• Custom Designs. Our team of engineers and furnace design experts can custom configure your conveyor belt furnace to fit your needs. You can customize belt width, choose between gas or electricity, and add in multiple performance zones and digital belt controls.
• Digital Belt Controls. Digital belt controls make it easy for human operators — or even smart centralized systems — to control the furnace from a safe distance. These precision controls create just-right conditions for handling fine and sensitive materials.
• Automatic Nitrogen Purge. Our furnaces’ automatic purge controls use nitrogen to manage low-humidity conditions. This keeps the furnace conditions stable and predictable.
• High Operating Temperatures. Our furnaces can safely reach temperatures of up to 1800°F-2100°F.

Conveyor Belt Furnace Applications

A diverse array of industries can improve their production process by incorporating a conveyor belt furnace. Some of the most common industrial applications include:

• Electronics. Sensitive electronic parts must be heat-treated in controlled environments with minimal humidity.
• Jewelry. Our furnaces give jewelry makers and manufacturers the flexibility to use multiple heat treating processes for different products, metal configurations, and more.
• Automotive. Our furnaces’ heat-treating capabilities provide precision automotive parts with the ductility, hardness, and corrosion resistance qualities they need.
• Medical. Hardening, annealing, and sealing processes make medical devices more inert and resistant to contamination.
• Munitions. Our conveyor belt furnaces can handle a wide array of metals, ranging from steel and cast iron to copper, brass, and titanium. They can be used to heat treat everything from bullets and fasteners to powdered metals and more.
• Aircraft and Aerospace. A conveyor belt furnace can heat treat, cure, and thermally process precision parts, such as hydraulics components and titanium parts.
• Wire. Annealing processes make wire more ductile and formable. Our furnaces can accommodate annealing processes and other heat-based treatments.
• Coining. Stamping coin-shaped cut-outs can expose raw metal edges. Adding fast, simple heat treating processes can seal the newly exposed metal from humidity and corrosion.
• Stamping. Stamped metal goods require further processes such as hardening and enameling to make the parts ready for use.
• Strip Metal Manufacturers. With belt size options of up to 36″ wide, our furnaces can accommodate strip metal manufacturing on virtually any scale.
• Tubing Manufacturers. Tubing manufacturers can use this equipment to anneal and finish formed tubes.

Conveyor Belt Furnace Processes

Our conveyor belt furnaces can be customized to handle these heat treating processes:

• Annealing. Annealing processes change the microstructure of metal goods and workpieces to reduce hardness and internal stress, make the piece more ductile, and change its electrical properties.
• Brazing. Brazing, like welding, joins metal pieces. A filler material is introduced to the joint between the workpieces through capillary action.
• Hardening. Heat working the metal properly makes it harder, tougher, and more resistant to deformation.
• Glass Sealing. Our furnaces can also create glass-to-metal seals for products that have both materials.
• Enameling. The enameling process applies a thin layer of glass powder to metal by melting and fusing it to the metal’s surface.
• Bonding. Our furnaces’ bonding processes use heat to fuse two materials in a tight hold.
• Normalizing. Normalizing heats and then air cools metals at room temperatures to reduce the material’s hardness for easier formability.
• Sintering. Sintering processes heat powders to create a solid workpiece without allowing the material to liquefy.
• Soldering. Soldering joins two workpieces together by melting solder and using it to create a joint between the two materials.
• Tempering. Tempering processes decrease a metal’s hardness to make it tougher and more ductile.

S.M. Engineering & Heat Treating Is Your Source for Conveyor Belt Furnaces

At S.M. Engineering & Heat Treating, we build high-quality tools that are built to last, out-perform, and help your production center reach new heights of quality and performance. Contact us to learn more about how we can start customizing a furnace unit to best fit your needs. You can also request a quote to start the conveyor belt furnace design process today.