The heat treatment is a combination of operations that include heating, maintaining and cooling of a metal in the solid state in order to obtain certain desirable properties from the metallurgical point of view or, at most, the modification of the surface characteristics.
The heat treatment consumes 17% of the electricity used in the United States by industries and has a strong impact on the production costs are high figures if you count that the total volume of business of the heat treatment in the United States is 75 billion dollars. The main cause of this type of sizing is definitely the close connection between this technology and the automotive market, and the U.S. has a huge impact.
Assessing the situation more globally there are more than 250 companies worldwide that produce equipment for the heat treatment (counting only the manufacturers of ovens!) At the top of this special list are, of course, the United States followed by China, Japan and South Korea.
