In a vacuum for a wide range of metal and its alloy in vacuum metallurgy, including vacuum distillation, ore and half products vacuum separation of metal compounds vacuum reduction, liquid steel vacuum degassing and refining outside the furnace, metal vacuum smelting, vacuum sintering, vacuum brazing and heat treatment, vacuum wait for a variety of solid phase bonding process method. Since the development of the vacuum metallurgy industry in the 1950s, it has been widely used because the vacuum environment has a series of characteristics in the metallurgical process:

Firstly, the chemical interaction between substances and residual gas molecules in the vacuum environment is very weak, so it is very suitable for smelting and refining ferrous metals, rare metals, ultra-pure metals and their alloys, and semiconductor materials.

Secondly, the partial pressure of a single gas molecule can be reduced in a vacuum environment to achieve degassing refining of liquid steel and vacuum deoxygenation of carbon.

Another characteristic of the vacuum environment is the ability to carry out certain reactions at lower temperatures. For example, at the same temperature, some reactions are difficult to carry out in the atmosphere, but easy to carry out at lower temperatures. This is the basic principle of vacuum compound decomposition and nonferrous metal smelting.