Walking beam furnaces can be designed to receive cold product from the storage yard or hot product from the caster. A walking beam furnace is designed to efficiently heat the incoming product to rolling temperatures with satisfactory temperature uniformity for further processing. The furnace size is determined by several factors - product 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 such as hydraulic or electro-mechanical. The length of the traverse stroke and the cycle time 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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