Steel Heat Treating Equipment
State of the Art Steel Furnaces
For more than 65 years, CEC has provided custom steel furnaces engineered for uniformity, throughput, and audit-ready data integrated with your quench, handling, and quality plan.
Built for results: Tight temperature uniformity, fast recovery, and repeatable cycles at production scale.
System integration: Charging/transfer, quench, temper, wash, and controls designed as one system.
Audit-ready: AMS 2750-aligned instrumentation, recipe/lot traceability, and automated reporting.
Please call us and see how one of our senior applications engineers can guide you through a design and installation process to meet your critical steel manufacturing needs.
Precision Steel Heat Treatment
CEC offers a wide variety of treatment options for both alloy steel & carbon steel. We specialize in large custom jobs and we have extensive experience designing furnaces and quenching systems to meet exacting steel property specifications.
In general, steel treatments can be understood by dividing them into four categories. See the sections below to learn more.
Steel Annealing Furnaces
Uniformity at production scale. We design circulation, zoning, and control strategies to achieve tight TUS results across full work zone.
Cycle time you can bank on. High-mass door/insulation packages, burner/SCR ramp strategies, and load-specific recipes reduce approach-to-setpoint and soak variability.
Atmosphere & surface integrity. Endo/N₂/H₂ and positive-pressure flow control with O₂ or dew-point monitoring to minimize scale/decarb and protect downstream finish operations. Optional retorts for alloy-critical work.
Built for uptime. Rugged construction for high-temp service (alloy selection, rolls, rails, fans, shafts, seals, bearings) with serviceable modules, and maintenance access engineered in from day one.
Data, compliance, and audit-ready. AMS 2750 instrumentation classes, recipe/lot traceability, secure data logging, and automated reports that match your quality system.
Integrated handling. From crane/gantry charging to multi-car indexing, we design the charging/quencher interface to your plant—not the other way around.
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Steel Reheating & Preheating Furnaces
Hit discharge temps with confidence. We model heat-up using load-specific thermal simulations and tune zone setpoints, circulation, and residence time to meet your core-to-surface ΔT targets at the discharge.
Uniform heat flux for minimal shadowing and avoiding cold stripes around skids, rollers, and tall sections.
Energy efficiency built in. High turndown ratio control, combustion-air preheat (recuperators/regenerators), smart gap management, and refractory packages sized for your cycle profile.
Designed for uptime. Engineered from the start with maintenance in mind.
Safety & compliance as a system. NFPA 86-compliant BMS, SIL-rated trains/valves, purge/ignition sequencing, flame supervision, pressure/LEL interlocks, and UL-508A control panels.
Steel Normalizing Furnaces
CEC designs normalizing furnaces to deliver uniform microstructures and predictable throughput. Thermal modeling, multi-zone control, and engineered circulation/baffles produce tight discharge ΔT across the load. We treat cooling as part of the system: on-rack bays, forced-air tunnels, or conveyor coolers with airflow patterns that minimize edge/stack effects and reduce distortion.
Reliability and data integrity are built in. High-temp fans, serviceable rolls, and out-of-hot-zone bearings keep capacity online. Controls provide recipe governance, lot tracking, inline/exit pyrometry, and automated charting, with AMS 2750-aligned TUS/SAT where customer specs demand it—so audits and root-cause work move faster.
Steel Hardening & Tempering Furnaces
Time-to-quench control. Furnace-to-quench geometries, door/hoist sequencing, and automated transfer drive low and consistent time to quench, improving hardness and minimizing distortion.
Quench engineered as part of the system. Oil, polymer, or air quench integrated with agitation profiles, heat extraction modeling, and media management to hit properties.
Distortion management. Proven load fixturing, zoned heating, and controlled soak strategies reduce residual stress before quench; recipe-driven temper cycles stabilize properties.
High-temp reliability. Fan wheels, alloy selection, seals, and refractory systems selected for repeated service. Consistent capacity between PM intervals.
Closed-loop quality. T/C density and class selection, sensor health checks, and automated charting mapped to your control plan for audit and RCA work.
