About Metal Heat Treatment

Metal Heat Treatment

Overview and identity

Metal Heat Treatment is a Chinese-language journal devoted to the heat treatment of metals. Its Chinese title is Jinshu Rechuli, it is also rendered in English as Heat Treatment of Metals, and its International Standard Serial Number is ISSN 0254-6051. It is published in Beijing under the Chinese Heat Treatment Society, according to Scopus-derived listings that name that society as publisher. Its roots lie in the 1970s, making it one of China's earliest specialist heat-treatment periodicals. Heat treatment is the set of processes — heating, holding and cooling metals under controlled conditions — by which the internal structure of a component, and therefore its hardness, strength, toughness and wear resistance, is set without changing its shape. A journal devoted entirely to those processes serves one of the most widely practised technologies in all of manufacturing.

The journal's longevity is visible in its indexing record. Scopus coverage is recorded for 1980, for 1986 to 1994, for 1998, and from 2001 onward into the 2020s — a pattern typical of long-running Chinese titles whose international database coverage resumed and then continued as Chinese journals were progressively incorporated. Subject listings place it in industrial and manufacturing engineering, metals and alloys, mechanical engineering and mechanics of materials, which accurately describes a title sitting between materials science and the factory floor.

The process at the centre of the journal

To understand the journal, a reader needs the basics of its subject, and the journal's field defines them consistently. Heat treatment puts a metal workpiece into a suitable medium, heats it to a suitable temperature, holds it at temperature for a period, and then cools it. The process generally includes those three stages — heating, holding, also called heat preservation, and cooling — and sometimes only heating and cooling. Compared with other processing methods, heat treatment generally does not change the shape of the workpiece or its overall chemical composition; instead it changes the microstructure inside the workpiece, or the chemical composition of its surface, thereby giving or improving the properties the part needs in service. Steel is the main material of metal heat treatment, and its behaviour rests on the phase transformations that occur during heating and cooling — the foundation laid historically by the metallographers who first showed steel's differing structures under the microscope and by the iron-carbon phase diagram.

Practitioners divide heat treatment into three broad categories: overall heat treatment, which treats the whole workpiece; surface heat treatment, which treats only the surface layer; and chemical heat treatment, which changes the surface's composition as well as its structure. The familiar named processes sit inside that framework. Annealing softens and refines; normalising heats and air-cools to produce a uniform, finer structure; quenching cools rapidly to produce a hard, martensitic structure; and tempering reheats a quenched part to restore toughness and relieve stress at a chosen level of hardness. The journal's entire contents are variations, refinements and applications of these fundamentals.

Scope: quenching, tempering and surface engineering

The journal publishes research and practice on quenching and tempering, the core hardening cycle for structural and tool steels. It covers carburising and nitriding, the chemical heat treatments in which carbon or nitrogen is diffused into a steel surface so that a hard, wear-resistant case forms over a tougher core — the classic treatment for gears and shafts. It covers induction heat treatment, in which a surface is heated rapidly by electromagnetic induction and quenched, and vacuum heat treatment, in which parts are processed in a vacuum environment that prevents oxidation and decarburisation and leaves bright, clean surfaces. Surface hardening in its various forms, and the furnaces, atmospheres, quenchants and control systems of heat-treatment equipment, complete the scope.

Distortion and quality control receive the attention their industrial importance deserves. A hardened part that warps, cracks or varies in hardness from batch to batch is scrap, however elegant its metallurgy, so the control of distortion during quenching, the uniformity of furnace temperature, the management of quench severity and the inspection of treated parts are standing concerns in the journal's pages. This is a journal where process parameters — temperatures, times, media, cooling rates — are the substance of articles, because in heat treatment the parameters are the product.

Applications: gears, tools, dies and structural steels

The components named in the journal's scope define its readership. Gears need carburised or induction-hardened surfaces to survive contact fatigue while their cores absorb shock. Tools and dies need quenching and tempering cycles that deliver hardness and wear resistance without brittleness or cracking, across tool steels whose alloy content makes their treatment unforgiving. Structural steels need normalising, quenching and tempering treatments that deliver certified strength and toughness for buildings, machinery and vehicles. Research on the heat treatment of metal materials for building steel structures, for example, treats the subject as an important aspect of metal processing widely applied in production, with implications for energy saving and environmental protection as well as performance.

Beyond those named areas, the same fundamentals govern bearings, springs, fasteners, automotive parts and agricultural and construction machinery components — in short, most of the metal parts that move, carry load or resist wear in Chinese industry. A specialist journal founded in the 1970s has consequently been able to follow the entire modernisation of Chinese manufacturing: from the atmosphere furnaces and oil quench tanks of earlier decades to vacuum furnaces, controlled-atmosphere carburising lines, induction scanners and computer-controlled processes.

Publisher, roots and continuity

The Chinese Heat Treatment Society, named as publisher in Scopus-derived listings, is the professional home of China's heat-treatment community, and the journal's Beijing base places it alongside the national mechanical engineering institutions with which that community is associated, including the heat-treatment institutions of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society described in directory records of the title. Society publishing matters in a practice-oriented field: conferences, standards work and shop-floor experience feed the same community that writes and reads the journal.

The journal's roots in the 1970s predate most of China's specialist materials press. Its Scopus trace begins in 1980, and the interrupted early coverage — 1980, then 1986 to 1994, 1998, and continuous coverage from 2001 — mirrors the history of Chinese technical publishing's integration into international databases rather than any break in the journal itself, whose Chinese core-journal presence is continuous. Few Chinese titles in any branch of metalworking can show a specialisation maintained across that span.

Indexing and standing

Metal Heat Treatment is indexed in Scopus, with the coverage history set out above, and it is listed in the Chinese core journal system. Scopus-derived metrics place it in the third and fourth quartiles of its engineering and materials categories — a realistic position for a Chinese-language, practice-oriented specialist title, whose influence is exercised mainly through the domestic industry it serves rather than through international citation counts. Its core-journal standing is the more important domestic signal: it is a selected, recognised venue for heat-treatment research and practice in China.

For international readers, the English rendering Heat Treatment of Metals and the romanised Jinshu Rechuli, together with its Scopus record under ISSN 0254-6051, make the journal findable, though its full text is Chinese and its primary audience is domestic.

Readership: researchers and plant engineers together

Directory descriptions of the journal stress that it serves both researchers and plant engineers, and that dual audience is its defining trait. A university researcher publishing a study of phase transformation or a new quenching medium and a works engineer reporting how a distortion problem on a production gear line was solved appear in the same journal, because heat treatment advances exactly at that junction: the science of microstructure must survive contact with tonnage, tolerances and cost.

Heat-treatment equipment is part of that junction, and the journal's coverage of furnaces and process equipment gives equipment makers and users a shared technical literature — on atmosphere control, vacuum technology, induction power supplies, quench systems and automation — that pure materials journals rarely provide.

Distinctions and place in the directory

Metal Heat Treatment is distinct from the broader materials-science titles covered elsewhere in this directory, which treat heat treatment as one topic among many in the study of metals. Here the relationship is reversed: materials appear as the objects of treatment, and the processes — annealing, normalising, quenching, tempering, carburising, nitriding, induction and vacuum treatment, surface hardening — are the subject. It is also distinct from mechanical-engineering journals in general, which cover heat treatment only as it touches design and manufacture.

In WorldNM's listing, the journal represents the specialist trade-science press of Chinese manufacturing at its most durable: Beijing-published, society-backed, rooted in the 1970s, Scopus- and core-listed, and devoted to the heating, holding and cooling by which China's gears, tools, dies and structural steels acquire the properties on which the machines built from them depend.