Heat treatment is any one of a number of controlled heating and cooling operations used to bring about a desired change in the physical properties of a metal. Its purpose is to improve the structural and physical properties for some particular use or for future work of the metal. There are five basic heat treating processes: hardening, case hardening, annealing, normalizing, and tempering. Although each of these processes bring about different results in metal, all of them involve three basic steps: heating, soaking, and cooling.
