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The walking beam furnace
can be designed to receive cold product from the storage yard
or hot product from the caster. The walking beam furnace is
designed to efficiently heat the incoming material to
rolling temperatures with satisfactory temperature
uniformity for further processing.
The furnace size is determined by several
factors — material size, material grade, required heating
time and production requirements. Modern furnaces are
designed to be fuel efficient and to produce low emissions.
The product is moved through the furnace via
a series of walking cycles — lift, traverse, lower and
return. This motion can be accomplished in several ways
utilizing hydraulic or electro-mechanical power. The length
of the traverse stroke and the cycle times are determined by
the product size and the production requirements.
State-of-the-art furnaces include
sophisticated computer control including product tracking,
delay management strategies and level 2 thermal modeling.
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