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Background. Some History
The use of cold temperatures to improve the performance of materials goes back a long time, although with varying degrees of understanding. Over the centuries, Swiss watchmakers subjected the delicate mechanical elements to the low temperatures of the Alps for long periods of time. This was one of the key factors to the quality of their creations.
At the end of the 19th century, the gas liquefying process was discovered, and this brought access to much lower temperatures than those reached in nature. This enabled, in the beginning of the 20th century, a series of experiments to be carried out to try and analyse the effects produced on the steel after its immersion in liquefied gas. Although the components often broke or cracked due to the thermal shock, it was already suspected that something was happening to the material.
After the Second World War, interest was lost in these lines of research and they were only continued in the aerospace industry due to the need to know the behaviour of materials subjected to the extreme temperatures of outer space. In the 1960s, the first cryogenic treatments appeared as the precursors to the current ones, designed to be performed in the industrial environment.
With the accessibility of liquid nitrogen and the development of improved temperature control systems, industrial cryogenic treatments were gradually developed and spread, initially in the US. Despite the fact that over the last few years their use is spreading worldwide, in Europe they are still quite unknown and hardly used.
CRYOBEST® multi-stage treatment is the latest step in this evolution. It is a process that constitutes a clear advance as regards conventional cryogenic treatments and which achieves better results and a considerable reduction in cost and process times.
