Surface® Combustion pioneered the development of the batch integral quench (BIQ) furnace design to serve a growing post World War II industrial boom which required many types of heat treating processes to be performed. The BIQ served this purpose as it easily performs through hardening, carburizing, carbonitriding, annealing and ferritic nitrocarburizing all in the same versatile furnace design. After thermal processing, the load is automatically transferred for oil, polymer or brine quenching or for slow cooling. Any of the forms of cooling are performed under an RX® (Endothermic Gas Generators), DX® (Exothermic Gas Generators), or Nitrogen protective atmosphere to protect the work surface against oxidation and also to improve the work piece appearance. This was a dramatic improvement at that time of introduction over transferring out into air before entering a quench medium. This revolutionized the heat treating industry and together with the stated atmospheres enabled the future of boost/diffuse carburizing, carbon control and all the instrumentation and sensors that grew out of this invention.

Surface named this miracle furnace the Allcase.

Today’s Allcase batch furnace looks similar but actually is much different than that of its grandfather from the 1950s. It is more automated and the physical load sizes and weights are much larger. The most common size today is the 36-48-36 which is more than four times larger in volume than 65 years ago. In addition, improvements in insulation, gas and electric heating technologies, recuperation, sensors and atmosphere control, quench tank volumes, agitation and oil heating and cooling technologies all make the Allcase a revolutionary piece of equipment even today. Surface still likes brick refractories which adds to process stability, especially in the carburizing process. Heating can be vertically or horizontally gas fired radiant tubes or various electric heating designs. Our patented Proelectric® design offers great uniformity and great life in challenging carbon bearing atmospheres.

Commercial heat treaters love the versatility as they never know what their next work coming in the door may be. Allcase equipment is intended to be grouped together with other Allcases and the required batch auxiliary equipment to become a heat treating cell of sorts.

Automation of the Allcase line motions and actions, even to the extent of bar code readers to send any given workload through a determined path of heat treating equipment and with all of the required data collection, is commonplace.

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