Conventional tools and components often do not suit the requirements of original equipment manufacturers (OEM) developing specialist or non-standard products. These may require low tolerances for physical variation, high uniformity with regards to thermodynamic characteristics, or numerous other unique requirements that cannot be assured with standard machinery. Custom industrial furnaces can, therefore, be extremely beneficial for OEM production lines with heat treatment requirements.
A custom industrial furnace eliminates elements of uncertainty for specialist thermal processing. They can be engineered with specific controls and capabilities to meet the most demanding of heat treatment challenges.
This blog post will explore four types of custom industrial furnace that Thermcraft has already manufactured.
Custom Industrial Box Furnace
Front-loading box furnaces are ubiquitous in thermal processing environments, but standard designs may not be suitable for high-throughput environments or chemically-sensitive products. Thermcraft designed a custom industrial box furnace with a dual chamber capacity and rear doors for rapid product unloading.
This novel machinery was also equipped with reliable atmospheric controls to ventilate oxygen and cure products in an inert atmosphere. This system was reinforced with low-explosion level detection flame curtains, to protect personnel and machinery in the unlikely event of an accident.
We have also provided box furnaces with automatic loading components. A front-loading manipulator essentially enables a custom industrial box furnace with automatic loading and unloading capacities. Programmable logic controllers (PLC) control the operation to ensure optimal handling of vibrating or non-uniform components. Thermcraft has extensive experience providing custom industrial box furnaces with front-loading manipulators and additional capabilities, including quench tanks and hydraulic retrieval mechanisms.
Bottom-Loading Elevator Furnace
A bottom-loading elevator furnace is ideal for highly-specialized heat treatment applications where samples may be loaded hot into the lower levels of a hydraulic unit. This mechanism raises the sample into the thermal chamber, the atmospheric content of which may comprise a range of blanketing or forming gases.
Thermcraft has designed a custom industrial furnace with an elevator unit and a built-in hydrogen atmosphere system. This feature is augmented with dual crucibles that can tightly control the cool-down rate of processed products to maintain good batch-to-batch reproducibility.
Car Bottom Furnace
The aptly-named car bottom furnace is used to perform a range of heat treatment processes in auto-engineering applications, including post-weld annealing and powder coating. These must often be built to bespoke specifications depending upon the intended use, manufacturing throughput, and the size and weight profiles of treated parts.
At Thermcraft, we have engineered several custom industrial furnaces for car bottom processing with three individual temperature zones featuring a combined power rating of 180 kW. Several thousand-pound loads are loaded onto hydraulic cars and transported through the full length of the furnace while treated at temperatures as high as 1204°C (2200°F).
Custom Tube Furnaces
Tube furnace geometries are almost as pervasive as box furnaces in modern thermal processing environments. They encompass a broad range of designs that are linked by a cylindrical heating chamber. This may be vertical or horizontal, comprising solid tube or split hinge designs. These may even be designed with rotating capacities with variable speed controls for innovative research and development.
Thermcraft engineers are experts in the design and construction of novel tube furnaces with custom specifications. We provide a fully-collaborative service that considers your requirements from every perspective, from volumetric requirements to maximum temperature values.
Learn more about our furnaces for OEM applications
This is a small selection of the custom industrial furnace types that Thermcraft offer, with a plethora of other examples available and additional capabilities available on request. If you would like any more information, please contact us directly.