Capabilities and Services
We engineer and simulate high-temperature process equipment — furnaces, kilns, reactors, sintering and quench systems. Decades of designing, commissioning and operating this equipment, applied to the question in front of you.
Problems We Are Engaged to Solve
Most engagements begin with one of the following.
The load doesn't come out uniform.
Temperature uniformity, zone balancing, burner and element placement, load spacing, and rack and fixture design. We show you where the field goes wrong, why, and what change fixes it.
We're not confident the furnace will pass its next survey.
Predicting uniformity survey behavior before the survey runs — locating the cold and hot regions, and testing a correction against the model before you pay for a retrofit.
We want more parts per cycle.
Load configuration and packing density: how tightly parts, boats or racks can nest before convection paths close off and radiation shadowing starts costing you uniformity.
The cycle is longer than it needs to be.
Transient heat-up, soak adequacy and quench rate — including the thermal lag of parts and fixtures you cannot instrument, which is usually what the extra soak time is paying for.
The hot face isn't lasting.
Refractory and hot-structure thermal stress, anchor design, expansion joints, and cycling fatigue life — why a lining spalls where it does, and what build-up survives the duty.
We're scaling a thermal process and don't know if it will hold.
Scale-up feasibility: heat and mass balance, chamber and reactor sizing, and identifying where the physics stops scaling linearly between pilot and commercial units.
How We Model High-Temperature Equipment
A furnace is not a convection problem with a larger number in it. Above roughly 900 °C, radiation dominates heat transfer and scales with the fourth power of temperature — a model that treats it as a secondary effect will disagree with your thermocouples, and it will disagree worst exactly where the load is worst. This is the part of the work that distinguishes high-temperature simulation from general-purpose CFD.
What that means in practice
- Radiative Heat Transfer: Surface-to-surface exchange, view factors, emissivity, and participating media. Getting radiation wrong is the most common reason a high-temperature model fails to match measured data.
- Vacuum and Controlled Atmosphere: Nitrogen, argon, hydrogen and partial-pressure operation, including gas quench — where convection is a design variable you are actively setting rather than a constant you inherit.
- Conjugate Heat Transfer: The chamber, the load and the fixturing solved together. In a loaded furnace the racks and boats are a large fraction of the thermal mass, and modeling the parts alone gives you the wrong answer.
- Transient Cycle Simulation: Heat-up, soak, hold and quench resolved over time. A steady-state result says very little about a process that never reaches steady state.
- Coupled Thermal Stress: Carrying the temperature field into structural FEA for expansion, anchor loads, spalling risk and cycling fatigue life.
- Temperature-Dependent Properties: Anisotropic, temperature-dependent material data embedded in the model rather than assumed constant — which matters enormously for graphite, composites and refractories.
- Validation Against Operating Data: Models checked against instrumented runs and real plant data. We have commissioned and operated this class of equipment, not only simulated it.
High-Temperature Material Selection and Guidance
Material choice in a furnace hot zone is a thermal, structural and economic decision at the same time, and the failure modes are unforgiving. We help specify hot-zone materials for thermal shock, oxidation, creep and cycling life — and flag the manufacturing constraints before they turn into a sourcing problem.
- Advanced Carbon Solutions: Evaluating and specifying specialized graphite grades (isostatic, extruded, extruded-molded) and Carbon-Fiber-Reinforced-Carbon (C/C) composites for extreme thermal shock resistance.
- Oxide-Based and Ceramic Matrix Composites: Navigating the selection of oxide-based composites (CMCs) and technical ceramics (SiC, Al2O3, ZrO2) to balance weight, oxidation resistance, and structural integrity.
- Refractory Metal Integration: Analyzing and sourcing refractory metals (tungsten, molybdenum, tantalum, niobium) for structural components facing ultra-high operational temperatures.
- Thermal Material Properties Database: Building and maintaining precise, anisotropic, temperature-dependent property sets, and embedding them directly into models and simulations.
- Manufacturing and Joining Constraints: Guidance on the machining, brazing and mechanical fastening limits inherent to brittle and refractory materials, before a design commits to something that cannot be built.
Equipment Design and Documentation
The simulation work is only useful if something gets built from it. We take thermal process equipment from concept through production-ready documentation, with the analysis and the drawings coming from the same hands.
- Chamber, Load and Fixture Modeling: Parametric 3D parts and assemblies built natively in SolidWorks — chambers, hot zones, racks, boats and fixturing — modeled for simulation and for manufacture.
- Production-Ready 2D Drawings: Clean ASME Y14.5-2009 compliant component and assembly drawings with tolerance stack-ups, ready for the shop floor.
- DFM and DFA Integration: Optimizing for manufacturing and assembly from day one, including the fabrication realities specific to refractory and high-temperature construction.
- Clean Data Organization: Well-structured feature trees, logical configurations and disciplined file management, so the package stays maintainable after we hand it over.
PE-Reviewed Calculation Packages
Independent review of thermal, structural and fluid calculations under the oversight of a licensed Mechanical PE — for internal sign-off, for a customer who needs a stamp, or simply to have someone adversarial check the math before it reaches the factory floor.
- Licensed Analytical Verification: Reviewing structural, thermal and fluid dynamics calculations with the oversight of a licensed California Mechanical PE.
- Assumption and Boundary Condition Auditing: Checking that simulation inputs, boundary conditions and material properties actually match the design intent and the real operating states.
- Risk and Logic Review: Assessing formulas, unit conversions and methodology for the hidden errors that survive a self-review.
Principal Engineers
Analysis, Design and PE Review
Licensed Professional Engineer with four issued patents and fifteen years designing, assembling and operating furnaces above 2,000 °C — including CFD and FEA models built to predict furnace behavior under the thermal loads of multi-megawatt electric plant equipment, validated through hands-on teardown, inspection and design iteration on critical production equipment.
High-Temperature Systems and Materials
Over thirty years in high-temperature equipment — beginning in the design office of a German furnace manufacturer, then developing crystal growth and prototype furnaces for silicon and optical materials, then as engineering director for a carbon-carbon composite and insulation maker serving vacuum heat treating and solar. Hot-zone material specification, furnace design, capital project delivery, and maintaining and repairing megawatt-scale systems in production. Patent holder in crystallization equipment, member of ASM International, working in German and English with European equipment makers.
Not sure whether simulation is the right tool for your problem? Ask. If it isn't, we'll tell you.
Book a Call