IHEA Can Take the Heat

According to the adage, if you can’t take the heat, you should get out of the kitchen. However, for the Industrial Heating Equipment Association (IHEA), the more heat, the better the association and its members are.

“Anything that involves heat, from melting metals in a foundry, to heat treating and curing paints and coatings, even to ovens for bakeries and pizzerias is what our members are touching,” said Bruce Bryan, IHEA Vice President of Sales and Education.

The 56-member association was established in 1929 as the Industrial Furnace Manufacturers Association to promote the interests of industrial furnace manufacturers. Since then, the group, which changed its name to IHEA in 1954, has expanded to include equipment designers and manufacturers from all areas of the heating industry with the mission to provide services to member companies that will enhance their capabilities to serve end users in the industrial heat processing industry and improve the member company’s business performance.

“It really is a broad-based group,” Bryan said. “We are very involved in the developed of safety standards and codes domestically and internationally and work to uphold the standards and codes and educate the entire industry on them.”

Included in our member’s product scope, but not limited to, are: furnaces: ovens; dryers; heaters; heating equipment; kilns; induction and dielectric apparatus; coke ovens; tanks for melting glass; salt bath or salt bath furnaces; oil, chemical and petro-chemical processing equipment; industrial combustion equipment; accessories for all the foregoing; and auxiliary equipment such as atmosphere generators, process controls, quenching apparatus, equipment for heat recovery and industrial washers.

As IHEA has grown, so has its responsibilities. “Currently, IHEA sits on the review committee for NFPA 86, the National Fire Protection Association’s standard for ovens and furnaces,” noted Bryan. “IHEA is also a participating member of ISO/TC 244, the International Organization for Standardization’s standard for industrial furnaces and associated processing equipment, representing the interests of our membership and U.S. based companies. We have been involved in the development of ISO TC244 from the outset,” Bryan said. “If we weren’t, that standard would have been developed and controlled by other countries, so we are protecting the interests of our members as well as the interests of those involved in U.S. manufacturing.”

IHEA constantly looks for ways to educate other manufacturers, with the goal of better educating the end users of thermal processing technologies. IHEA’s educational seminars focus on combustion, infrared, induction, safety and more. That goal of education is one of the reasons IHEA became a LIFT affiliate member.

“We thought there was good synergy between what our organizations are doing,” Bryan said. “Any process LIFT works in, is what we’ll share information across with our membership and industry at large.”
For additional information on IHEA, please visit www.ihea.org.