CONTROLLED atmosphere technology (CAT) is any process that takes place in a special gas mixture rather than ordinary air. It is applied principally to metal production and finishing, as well as to electronic assembly and packaging.
While the heat treatment of metals is hardly a familiar topic, the results are visible in every aspect of daily life.
Take a typical working day. You wake up in the morning, reach for your glasses and peer at your watch. You turn on the tap, maybe have a shave and use a spoon in some cornflakes. Then you grab your mobile phone and get on your bike – spectacle frames, watch cases, copper water pipes, razor blades, cutlery and bicycle chains have all been heat treated during manufacture to give them an attractive corrosion-proof finish or toughen them up to do their job properly.
One of the biggest users of heat treatment processes are car manufacturers. Up to five per cent of the cost of new cars is accounted for by the cost of heat treatment, with most of the thousands of metal components in a modern vehicle treated at one or more stages of their manufacture.
The vast majority of these heat treatments are carried out in a controlled atmosphere either to protect the component or to change its surface chemistry.
BOC’s CAT business
BOC entered the CAT market in the 1960s. Before then, heat treating companies used solid media, such as cast iron swarf, or even produced controlled atmospheres themselves. From these small beginnings the company now has many markets throughout the globe, including the UK, the US, South Africa, Japan and Australia.
There are three types of services that BOC provides to its customers, explained Dave Wardle, global business manager for controlled atmospheres.
“We supply heat treatment companies with gas in the same way as we do in other market sectors, from cylinder supply through bulk supply to on-site generation as an external service package,” he said.
“But we also add value to this gas provision, supplying control panels for mixing gases to give the required atmospheres, some with automatic feedback to respond to changing conditions in the process.”
“Beyond that, we aim to provide know-how, access to the technology, discussion and training of personnel.”
The innovative website, dubbed CATweb, is expected to prove an important tool in developing this market.
CAT goes online
CATweb has a number of objectives. First and foremost, it is an information source and contains everything that a BOC Group company needs to run a CAT business. It has a news section, highlighting metal treatment events and new technical papers. BOC’s five brochures and 15 tech topics in this area are now not printed at all – if you want them you can find them on the website.
CAT is the first sector within BOC to go ‘paperless’ in technical and marketing material. Anyone anywhere can register with the site and get access to this data. Surfers not in the BOC network should, however, be warned that it can take half an hour to download a medium-sized brochure, although a tech topic takes only a few seconds.
CATweb also contains areas that can only be accessed by customers, commercial partners or BOC staff themselves, with increasingly more revealed as you ascend the chain. These levels are interactive, so that problems can be discussed.
The site is also a powerful educational and training resource, and it is adapted to its global readership – Korean customers can read material in their own language.
Another major advantage of the website is internal. Because the market is truly global, in some parts of the world local CAT representatives may have to share their efforts with other market sectors. Even so they still need access to full technical expertise and CATweb gives them instant back up and advice from full-time CAT experts thousands of miles away.
Conclusion
Heat treatment plays an extremely important part in our lives, from our watches to our cars, and as such it was only a matter of time before that heat treatment and technology clashed. Moving its CAT business online has given BOC access to a global customer base and gives its customers a unique opportunity to discover the world of heat treatment online.
WEB: http//:CATweb.boc.com