Recently, our company’s self-developed, designed, and manufactured large-scale intelligent core vacuum annealing furnace successfully passed in-house testing and acceptance procedures and has been smoothly delivered to a leading domestic enterprise specializing in the processing of high-performance silicon steel, amorphous, and nanocrystalline soft magnetic materials.
This successful project marks another critical breakthrough in our technical capabilities and engineering delivery excellence in the field of high-end vacuum heat treatment equipment, further solidifying our position as a core supplier of precision material processing solutions.
The customer is a key service provider in the magnetic materials industry, supplying core iron cores to numerous top-tier manufacturers of motors, reactors, and new-energy transformers. As end products rapidly evolve toward higher efficiency, lower losses, and miniaturization, the customer has imposed exceptionally stringent requirements on key electromagnetic performance parameters of core materials—such as magnetic permeability, core loss (iron loss), and coercivity. Conventional protective-atmosphere annealing processes have reached their limits in preventing oxidation, minimizing impurity contamination, and ensuring uniform stress relief, making them inadequate for the next generation of high-performance silicon steel and brittle amorphous ribbon materials. The customer urgently required an advanced annealing system capable of operating in a high-vacuum, ultra-high-purity environment with precisely controlled thermal profiles to achieve optimal magnetic performance.
Our Solution: Customized Core Vacuum Annealing Furnace System
In response to the customer’s specific material characteristics—such as the brittleness of amorphous thin ribbons—and process objectives—ultra-low core loss and high magnetic induction—our technical team developed a fully customized vacuum annealing solution. The core equipment features the following outstanding advantages:
Ultra-High Vacuum and Exceptional Purity Environment
Equipped with a multi-stage vacuum system (mechanical pump + Roots pump + diffusion pump), achieving an ultimate vacuum of ≤5×10⁻⁴ Pa, ensuring extremely low residual oxygen and moisture levels to completely prevent oxidation during processing.
An all-stainless-steel vacuum chamber with specially treated interior surfaces, combined with high-temperature bake-out functionality, significantly reduces hydrocarbon and other impurity contamination, guaranteeing pristine material surface quality.
Precise and Uniform Temperature Field Control
Features a multi-zone independently controlled resistance heating system, integrated with an optimized thermal design and optional gas circulation, ensuring temperature uniformity within ±3°C across the entire effective heating zone—even in furnaces several meters long. This ensures consistent electromagnetic performance across every batch and position.
Our proprietary intelligent temperature control system supports programming of dozens of heating, soaking, and cooling segments, enabling precise execution of even the most complex annealing profiles.
Specialized Fixturing and Protection for Core Materials
Custom-designed high-temperature alloy fixtures and support structures prevent deformation or collapse of laminated silicon steel stacks or wound amorphous cores during high-temperature processing.
Optional high-purity nitrogen or argon rapid quenching systems enable controlled fast cooling—avoiding oxidation while achieving targeted magnetic properties and significantly improving production throughput.
Full Automation and Data Traceability
Integrated PLC and touchscreen interface enable one-button fully automatic operation, covering the entire cycle: vacuum pumping, leak checking, heating, soaking, cooling, and backfilling.
All critical process parameters—including vacuum level, zone temperatures, pressure, gas flow rates, and timing—are automatically recorded and compiled into reports, providing a complete digital data chain for process optimization and product traceability.
From contract signing onward, our project team worked closely with the customer’s process engineering department through rigorous stages including conceptual review, design optimization, manufacturing oversight, and factory acceptance testing (FAT). The final equipment not only fully met but in some aspects exceeded the agreed technical specifications. Following delivery, our field engineers provided on-site installation guidance, commissioning support, and assisted the customer in completing initial process trials.
This successful delivery of the core vacuum annealing furnace not only resolved a specific, high-difficulty process challenge for one customer but also set a new performance benchmark for the entire high-end soft magnetic materials heat treatment industry. It demonstrates unequivocally that, in the pursuit of ultimate electromagnetic performance, an ultra-clean vacuum environment combined with precisely controlled thermal processing is an indispensable foundation.