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One of the ongoing needs in the materials industry is to facilitate significant production cost saving due to energy usage. One way to do this is to use the thermal energy generally emitted during heat treatment to facilitate additive reactions with the material surface. This has been successfully done by formulating specific lubricity additives into on a oil or aqueous quenching media. When the material is heated and subsequently quenched, the lubricity additive will then react with the surface providing substantial improvements in lubricity. This process is called: “coat forming”. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of coat forming reactions, additives, and subsequent application performance.

One of the most important heat treating processes is steel carburizing. However, the relatively long process times makes carburizing (and related thermochemical processes) a particularly energy consumptive and expensive process. Thus, if significant reductions in process times or temperatures can be achieved, this would result in substantial product cost savings and reduced energy consumption. Various methods of accelerating the carburizing process have been reported previously including: the use of rare earth metals, optimization by computer control of endo gas composition, use of superficial nitriding and others. In this paper, an overview of a new process using a hydrocarbon decomposition reaction catalyst that results in substantial diffusion rate acceleration and/or the potential use of significantly lower carburization temperatures will be discussed.