SECO/VACUUM News

Watlow Electric Manufacturing Purchases New SECO/VACUUM Annealing Furnace

Watlow Electric Manufacturing Company, who will celebrate its centennial in 2022, has ordered - from SECO/VACUUM, a SECO/WARWICK Group company - a high-vacuum Vector® furnace and auxiliaries for its Mexican plant.

(Meadville PA, December 2, 2021)

The furnace will be used for annealing thermocouple wires between every drawing stage. High purity is important in order to maintain perfect surface quality of the wire and this Vector HPGQ 6-bar furnace is the optimal solution for the task.

A complete vacuum heat treat package

The Vector® furnace for this application has a working zone size of 40”x40”x48” (1,000x1,000x1,200mm) with a 1.5 ton load capacity. The furnace package includes a 20,000 l/s diffusion pump for high vacuum operation as well as a closed loop water system, loading cart and nitrogen reservoir. It will be capable of high pressure gas quenching with Nitrogen up to 6 bar.

The furnace was customized with an oversized work zone since the standard 36”x36”x48” zone size was too small for their needs. Some degree of customization is often requested of SECO/VACUUM since it is one of the known strengths of the company. With a very large installed base and a vertically integrated global engineering and manufacturing plant in Europe, SECO/WARWICK has the depth and capabilities to deliver on a wide range of customer needs with efficiency and dependability.

SECO/VACUUM and Watlow Electric Manufacturing Co

“Watlow has had a very positive experience with us ever since we commissioned their first Vector at their Richmond IL plant in 1999. They have appreciated the aftermarket support we’ve provided along the way, and when their Mexico plant needed an upgrade, they again turned to us to meet their needs. We find that taking good care of our customers results in our customers taking good care of us. It just makes good business sense.” -said Peter Zawistowski, SECO/VACUUM Managing Director.

Karla Sarabia, Watlow Electric Manufacturing Company’s manager on the Mexican plant’s project, said, “We wanted a furnace that aligned perfectly with the exceptional capabilities and operation at our Illinois facility to ensure uniform product quality among plants. It’s also a big advantage that SECO/VACUUM has local maintenance support to serve our needs in Mexico.”

Vector® for special tasks

Vector is the perfect vacuum heat treat solution for applications in the sensor and thermocouple sector because of its reliability and process flexibility. Watlow and other companies alike conduct heat treating and annealing in Vector vacuum furnaces the world over on a wide range of industrial heaters and thermal components to ensure long life in their customers’ demanding applications. Vector is capable of conducting a broad range of heat treatment processes giving in-house heat treating departments enormous flexibility to optimize their ROI. These include annealing, brazing, hardening, LPC and LNP, normalizing, solution heat treating, sintering and tempering.