Heat treatment is a critical part of achieving the right performance from a cast metal component. By carefully controlling heating and cooling processes, we can help tailor the material’s properties to meet the demands of your application, whether that means improving hardness, increasing strength, relieving internal stresses or enhancing machinability.
At AATi, we take a technical, application-led approach to heat treatment. We work with you to understand the function of your component, its operating environment and the properties it needs to deliver. From there, we can advise on the most appropriate heat treatment route to achieve the required specification, balancing performance, consistency and cost.
Key heat treatment processes
- Annealing — Softens material, improves ductility and machinability, and helps relieve internal stresses.
- Normalising — Refines the material’s microstructure to promote more uniform properties and improve consistency.
- Quenching — Rapidly cools material to develop increased hardness and strength where the alloy and process permit.
- Tempering — Follows hardening to reduce brittleness and achieve a suitable balance of hardness, toughness and strength.
- Stress relieving — Reduces residual stresses created during casting, machining or other manufacturing processes, helping to improve dimensional stability.
- Solution heat treatment — Dissolves selected phases within an alloy to prepare the material for subsequent processing or ageing.
- Ageing / precipitation hardening — Develops increased strength and hardness in suitable alloys through controlled time and temperature cycles.
- Homogenising — Reduces chemical variations within certain cast alloys to improve material uniformity.
The right process for your application
Heat treatment is not simply a standard finishing operation. The correct approach depends on the alloy, casting geometry, required mechanical properties and intended service conditions. An unsuitable cycle can introduce distortion, cracking or undesirable material characteristics, so process selection and control are essential.
Our role is to help you make informed technical decisions. We can advise on the relationship between alloy selection, heat treatment and final component performance, helping establish a practical route to meet your requirements. Where necessary, this includes identifying relevant material standards, mechanical property targets and inspection or testing requirements.
Your specification defines the challenge. Our technical expertise helps determine the right route to achieve it.
Published technical details may be subject to revision. Contact the foundry to confirm current specifications and material availability for your project.
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