Industries

• Aerospace
• Tooling
• Chemical
• Oil and Gas
• Marine
• General Machining

Related Processes

Solution Annealing

Induction

Normalizing

Common Alloys

• Most materials can be annealed.  Annealing is not to be confused with Solution Annealing.

TMT Equipment/Variations

• Parts can be annealed in a vacuum or an air atmosphere.  For higher temperature annealing, parts will become scaled if annealed in air.
• Sub-Critical annealing, also called “sub-annealing” and “process annealing” is a cost-effective method of annealing steel.  Parts are heated to below the critical point of steel and held.  This will greatly reduce the residual stress and hardness of the material.  As the parts do not need to have a slow controlled cool from the annealing temperature, the cycle time is much reduced.
• Full annealing is the process in which steel is heated above its critical point and then cooled slowly in a furnace.  It is a much more time intensive process than sub-critical annealing so is used when maximal removal of residual stress and hardness is needed.
• Spherodize Annealing is an annealing process for high carbon steels where parts are heated and cooled in a manner to form a soft ferritic matrix with spherical carbides.  It is generally used for parts which will subsequently be subjected to large amounts of cold work.
• Induction Annealing/Normalizing is a selective heat treating process where processing can be limited to certain areas of the part.  See Induction Heat Treat for more information.

Applications

• Used often prior to machining to reduce hardness. 
• Also frequently used to relieve stress from significant cold work.​ ​

Associated Specs/Standards

• ASTM A668
• MIL 1684
  

What To Consider When Specifying

• Material
• Furnace Atmosphere
• Spec (if required)

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Have more technical questions?  Contact a TMT engineer here.