California Plant Providing Hydriding/Dehydriding

Solar Atmospheres of California recently added metal Hydride/Dehydride process services to its list of capabilities.

The Hydride process is used to recover high value scrap metal, such as Tantalum, Niobium and Titanium. The metal is loaded into a vacuum furnace which is pumped down into deep vacuum to remove gases that will react with the metal as it is heated. When the load is heated to a critical temperature, dry hydrogen is introduced into the vacuum chamber. The scrap metal reacts with the hydrogen gas creating hydrides which are extremely brittle.

In the hydrided condition the scrap metal can be easily crushed and milled into a powder. These powders are then processed in a vacuum furnace to remove the hydrogen resulting in a pure metal powder that can be used as a master alloy or sold to customers who use powdered metal to make parts.

Special safety and monitoring equipment has been incorporated in our vacuum furnaces to perform this process.