.

November 14, 2024

Heat Treat Today is privileged to oversee the 40 Under 40 recognition awards highlighting a group of rising young leaders in the North American heat treat industry every year. The Class of 2024 is a high-achieving, motivated, and heart-felt group of significant contributors to the heat treat market. Here are two highlights from this year’s class.  

Zack Cooney is a quality manager at commercial heat treater Nitrex Heat Treating Services. Since 2013, he has held responsibilities across production, health and safety, and quality, consistently demonstrating his commitment to his role as a team leader. During his time as manager of Health and Safety, he developed and implemented health and safety plans in the workplace according to standards from management and legal sources. Additionally, he would evaluate current practices, procedures, and facilities to assess risk and adherence to OSHA and ANSI laws. Zack’s biggest accomplishment has been achieving Nadcap accreditation with 18-month merit. Leading the team, he orchestrated a meticulous preparation process to meet stringent aerospace industry standards, conducting a comprehensive gap analysis, upgrading equipment, refining procedures, and training the team extensively. Through collaborative efforts with engineers, quality assurance, and production managers, the team successfully achieved Nadcap Merit accreditation within eleven months. This milestone aligned with the company’s commitment to quality and compliance, but it also had a broad industry effect in allowing Nitrex to serve the aerospace sector due to the new opportunities that came about by being recognized with commendations from auditors. Read more about Zack here.

Tyler Shrewsbury is a process engineer at the Fairbury, IL, plant of PTC Steel, a manufacturer of ERW and DOM steel tubing. With only four years in the industry, he has been the leader of several process improvement projects for the plant’s roller hearth furnace. These projects focused on meeting NFPA 86 safety standards, developing preventative maintenance plans, upgrading process controls & monitoring systems, and improving overall productivity. In other areas of his work, Tyler is known to connect with other professionals in the heat treating industry to gain insight and guidance regarding furnace designs and gas atmospheres. Several systems that he has become familiar with are boiler Cogen Exothermic systems, Dx Exothermic generators, and liquid nitrogen atmosphere systems. He is working on a capital project to install a large-scale nitrogen generation system. Tyler has coordinated companywide training events to improve the combustion engineering knowledge for heat treating tubes within the company. Additionally, his current work brings him in collaboration with engineers and operations teams at other PTC plants with industrial furnaces to develop standards and best practices that will improve furnace reliability and product consistency. Read more about Tyler here.

Learn More▶️