In the current market, there has been a significant tightening of requirements on the physico-mechanical properties
of the products made by the metallurgical and machine-building sectors. The quality indices that now exist for metal can be
achieved by developing new metallurgical equipment, machines, and production units, as well as by modernizing existing
equipment [1].
One example of the introduction of modern technologies is the reverberatory heat-treatment furnace with pulse-type
heating system that was developed by the Research Institute of Problems in Energy Conservation and Automation. The Institute
is part of Ural State Technical University – Ural Polytechnic Institute (UGTU–UPI). The Institute worked with the company
Gaz-Inzhiniring to introduce one of these furnaces at a Ural factory.
Until recently, certain aspects of the two-stage regime used to anneal tubes made of steel ShKh15 [2] made it necessary
to perform this heat treatment exclusively in continuous furnaces [3, 4]. At the same time, the need for interruptions
in the heat-treatment operation and the lengthy, slow cooling required in the second stage significantly complicated the design
of these furnaces and almost completely negated the advantages of the given type of annealing. The development of modern
reverberatory heat-treatment furnaces is making it possible to efficiently use the two-stage regime for the heat treatment of
tubes, thus providing the metal with an optimum combination of hardness and structure.
Plans called for the construction of a heat treatment furnace with the following characteristics (Fig. 1):