Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The process or art of treating substances by means of heat, so as to remove their brittleness and at the same time render them tough and more or less elastic.
  • noun Same as tempering.
  • noun A founders' term for the slow treatment of the clay or loam cores for castings, which, after having been dried, are burned or baked, and then are slowly cooled.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The process used to render glass, iron, etc., less brittle, performed by allowing them to cool very gradually from a high heat.
  • noun The burning of metallic colors into glass, earthenware, etc.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act of heating solid metal or glass to high temperatures and cooling it slowly so that its particles arrange into a defined lattice.
  • verb Present participle of anneal.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun hardening something by heat treatment

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word annealing.

Examples

  • The term annealing usually implies relatively slow cooling.

    MyLinkVault Newest Links 2009

  • Distribute Attachment 8-A, "Water and Oil Quenching" and ask participants to define and discuss the terms annealing, hardening and tempering.

    Chapter 8 1982

  • These bubbles and channels form within the polymers as they are being created in a baking process, called annealing, that is used to improve the materials 'performance.

    cellular-news 2009

  • The process involves high pressures, high temperatures, irradiation, and annealing, which is the precise control of the heating and cooling process.

    Crystal Death Charles Kipps 2010

  • The process involves high pressures, high temperatures, irradiation, and annealing, which is the precise control of the heating and cooling process.

    Crystal Death Charles Kipps 2010

  • The process involves high pressures, high temperatures, irradiation, and annealing, which is the precise control of the heating and cooling process.

    Crystal Death Charles Kipps 2010

  • This process was called annealing, and the oven with a movable floor was technically denominated a leer.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 Various

  • "We didn't even consider the idea of annealing helicases before this study started," said Kadonaga.

    Medlogs - Recent stories 2008

  • This process is called "annealing" and is exactly analagous to the physical process (used to produce stable crystalline formations) of the same name.

    Progressive Bloggers 2009

  • 350° C. up to just below the lower critical, and forms sorbitic steel; while "annealing" refers to a heating for grain size at or above the transformation ranges, followed by a slow cooling.

    The Working of Steel Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel 1916

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • The process of slowly cooling a completed glass object in an auxiliary part of the glass furnace or in a separate furnace. If a hot glass object is allowed to cool too quickly, it will be highly strained by the time it reaches room temperature and may break from the strain.

    November 9, 2007

  • Not to be confused with simulated annealing:

    Simulated annealing (SA) is a generic probabilistic meta-algorithm for the global optimization problem, namely locating a good approximation to the global optimum of a given function in a large search space. It is often used when the search space is discrete (e.g., all tours that visit a given set of cities). In favorable cases, simulated annealing may be more effective than exhaustive enumeration of the search space.

    The name and inspiration come from annealing in metallurgy, a technique involving heating and controlled cooling of a material to increase the size of its crystals and reduce their defects. The heat causes the atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions (a local minimum of the internal energy) and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the slow cooling gives them more chances of finding configurations with lower internal energy than the initial one.

    November 9, 2007

  • Good heavens, sionnach. Now I'll never confuse the two.

    November 9, 2007

  • I just like the image of the atoms wandering randomly, like Odysseus, through "states of higher energy". Just like the traveling salesman wandering forlornly from city to city, in search of the elusive global optimum.

    November 9, 2007

  • I actually studied simulated annealing in class today, funny coincidence.

    November 9, 2007

  • Atoms as salespeople. I'll never see them the same way again. ;-)

    November 9, 2007

  • Of course, annealing could also refer to the state of a glazier when working by the glory hole. Or altar boys.

    November 9, 2007