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Up Topic Welding Industry / Technical Discussions / Argon Reclaimer for argon Heat furnace
- - By Terry Vititoe 2 (*) Date 07-16-2010 10:40
Does anybody know of a company that makes a Reclaimer for heat furnaces?? We use a lot of Argon in the heat treatment of turbine components, and it just seems like a waste to vent it into the atmosphere.  Thoughts???
Parent - By js55 (*****) Date 07-16-2010 11:07
I can see some real technical difficulties with this if I understand this correctly, or not.
If regaining argon purity is your problem I would think that you need a unit that reduces gaseous temperature to a point that individual gases and gaseous impurities, can be seperated through the liquid state. This is how the gases are 'manufactured' in the first place. My thought would be this would be prohibitively expensive since the energy required to do this, and the cost of the equipment, would be in excess of the savings gained.
If the gas is assumed to remain as pure coming out as going in the all you need do is recirculate and maybe attach an analyzer to verify its purity to an acceptable level. If your process is clean and controlled perhaps you could achieve several uses of the same gas which would require minimal investment.
- By Terry Vititoe 2 (*) Date 07-16-2010 16:20
thanks for the info, I'll do some more checking w/engineering and get back with you
- By Terry Vititoe 2 (*) Date 07-16-2010 16:47
found a few things out so far:
1. The maintainence people claim the Argon is dirty from the pumps & thats the way they have always done it (like I haven't heard that before)
2. The purchasing people are spending about 40K to 50K per year on argon.
3. I'm going to talk to our welding engineer about how clean the argon has to be if we captured it & used it for welding.
4. I'm going to talk to our process engineer about checking the purity

Thoughts???
Up Topic Welding Industry / Technical Discussions / Argon Reclaimer for argon Heat furnace

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