In contrast to other existing facility designs (multi-stack furnaces sealed with sand), our HITT (High Temperature & Tight) furnace provides a complete, gas-tight separation of the workload space and the combustion chamber.

This separation allows a precisely-controlled atmosphere to be achieved, with significantly lower hydrogen consumption. A special patented coil support enables radiant heat to uniformly and efficiently heat coils in the workload space, leading to a significant reduction in scrap.

Paired with a cooling bell, this system ensures the shortest possible processing times. It provides the highest productivity, paired with the best possible quality and high throughput. The safety concept for processing in hydrogen has been adopted from HICON/H₂ bell annealers, and either an electric or a gasfired heating system can be installed.

High-temperature anneals use secondary recrystallization to form grains with the magnetically advantageous Goss texture (3). The high processing temperatures (above 1150 °C) and straight hydrogen atmospheres also remove sulfur and nitrogen from the material (4). First, a drying phase (1) is used to dry the MgO coating applied during an upstream process, which inhibits the formation of stickers in the wraps at high workload space temperatures by forming a Forsterite layer (2). The processing steps (1 – 5) of the high-temperature anneal are depicted schematically in the following figure.