EPS President Ken Klein’s article discussing tips and tools for choosing the right oven was featured this month in Process Heating Magazine, a well known resource for manufacturing engineers who use heat processing equipment and supplies, including product, design and plant engineers.
The article focuses on not only what to look for, but also what to avoid when choosing an industrial oven that will be designed specifically for the application. Customers with clear requirements, Ken points out, are the easiest to understand and to provide the proper oven for their needs:
“Oven building can be a challenging enterprise, especially where large industrial ovens are concerned.”
Included in Ken’s list of items to think about? Crucial items like airflow and rate of rise rank high on the list. These will influence things like efficiency and recovery time down the road.
Last week, EPS President Ken Klein shared with us three categories of customers who purchase large industrial ovens. In this week’s post Ken shares with us what to look for when making the purchase:
Airflow – In real estate, the three primary considerations are location, location and location. For a large forced convection oven the primary considerations, as I see it, are airflow, airflow and airflow. Sounds pretty basic, doesn’t it? But airflow is going to determine a number of things, like how efficiently you will heat your load, how fast you will recover after a door open if you will be taking parts in and out, and the temperature uniformity you can expect. And yes – I have chatted with prospective customers who are entertaining quotes from other builders for their standard horizontal-in-from-the-side-vertical-return-to-the-ceiling airflow patterns, when as it turns out their load would block vertical airflow. Likewise I’ve seen instances of a customer looking at horizontal side-to-side quotes when they will stand large panels on end that will block the flow. Give this some thought up front—it will save you a lot of nightmares downstream.
Rate of Rise – How fast do you want to get to temperature? It’s one thing to say you want to get there in 45 minutes if you are heating a load that doesn’t weigh much. Heating up a 40,000 lb. weldment is another story. Be realistic, and depending on the weight and nature of your load the air temperature may get there long before the core of your product.
Next up: Ken talks about the difference between accuracy and uniformity and the challenges of control.
This car-bottom annealing furnace, designed and built by EPS for a large steel fabricator, is used to anneal large weldments, where the load weight can be up to 7500 lbs. The unit is direct gas fired, with burners high on one side and low on the other, providing a top operating temperature of 1250F. The self-propelled load car rides on rails set in the floor, and is L-Shaped, with its back vertical wall becoming the front of the furnace when the car is driven fully into the chamber. Three control zones allow for a close control over uniformity in the chamber.
We invite you to ask EPS about your next large heat treat furnace requirements. In addition to designing and building large custom furnaces and ovens, we offer a full array of pharmaceutical ovens, as well as small standard lab ovens and laboratory and production heat treat furnaces.
Whether you are seeking industrial ovens for heat treating, aging, curing, or bake out processes, Engineered Production Systems encompassing experience is capable of handling any or all of your oven needs. EPS engineers have been designing batch and continuous ovens for a diverse number of industries and client applications since inception in 1978. We use the highest quality components when manufacturing our ovens. Our relationships with prominent control system makers, such as honeywell, Partlow, and Barber Colman allow us to optimize which system is best for which oven. We will also listen to your requested specifications for both the control systems and oven design. You can contact us at any time to customize your oven or for any further questions. For reference, we’ve listed the various industrial oven applications below.
Solar panel demand and subsequent manufacturing are growing at an impressive rate. As noted in one report, “Solar power has been expanding rapidly in the past eight years, growing at an average pace of 40 percent per year”. At the same time, the cost per kilowatt-hour of solar photovoltaic systems has also been dropping, while electricity generated from fossil fuels is becoming more expensive. Ultimately meaning that solar power is projected to reach cost parity with conventional power sources in many US markets by 2015 with total contribution to the USA’s power needs reaching 10% by 2025. With a plethora of movers and shakers behind the solar movement, including at the State and Federal level, the solar market and demand for relative products has no ceiling.
As this exciting time in solar energy continues to evolve, EPS ovens is matching the excitement by offering Continuous and Batch ovens for Solar Panel Curing. Our latest technology in computer based control for solar panel curing ovens offers the versatility to meet your requirements for solar panel manufacturing, as we have for multiple customers to date.
We can work with you quickly to provide a comprehensive proposal as we all move forward with this burgeoning solar power technology .
EPS Ovens specializes in the full range of capabilities for Composite Curing Ovens.While these ovens can used for a wide variety of applications, they are mainly used for curing composites in the aerospace and automotive industries.
With multiple design options,composite curing ovens can be custom engineered and manufactured to fit almost any floor footprint, cure time cycle, batch process and dimension.These options can include Oven Control Systems, Vacuum Systems, Airflow Patterns, and Heater Box Location.
EPS Ovens has worked with many companies over the last 30 years, designing composite curing ovens to meet their requirements for production, safety, and budgeting.
Contact EPS ovens to answer all of your oven questions, help figure out what will work best for your next composite curing oven, and get a free quote.Contact EPS Ovens
The SHEL LAB oven series offers a diverse choice of forced air ovens (floor models and bench-top units), gravity convection, clean room ovens, nitrogen purge ovens, and vacuum ovens. You will often hear the terms drying oven, curing oven, or bake out oven being used in industrial applications. These are generic terms that can be represented across multiple heat processing applications. Click here for help finding the SHEL LAB Oven that will best fit your application.
Cress Heat treat (Hardening) furnaces have higher heat output power than draw furnaces due to the elevated temperatures at which they operate. Heat transfer to the tool steel is accomplished by a very efficient process called direct radiation. Temperature uniformity in these furnaces is best in the red heat range. Normal maximum temperature is 1232°C (2250°F). Optional 1316°C (2400°F.
We have recently published a new page that covers all of the various lab oven, vacuum oven, and high performance ovens available from Sheldon Manufacturing. If you are having trouble identifying the right oven we hope this will help clarify the differences between various models and drying, curing or bake-out applications.
EPS Ovens has recently began offering complete custom vacuum oven solutions that include pumps and plumbing for simple installation once it reaches your facility. If you are looking for a vacuum oven to perform drying, curing or out-gassing applications please contact us to discuss your application. EPS offers small vacuum ovens starting at 0.6 cubic feet, up to our large 9 cu.ft vacuum oven.
EPS also represents the entire SHEL LAB line of benchtop drying ovens, which can also be customized to include access ports, chart recorders, and altered to accommodate automation processes.
When Leading Edge, of Decatur, IL, a state of the art design firm with manufacturing capability, was asked by its major railway customers to consider providing manganese steel rails, they came to Engineered Production Systems (EPS) for a heat processing solution. View an image of the Tip-up Furnace
Leading Edge proposed to load 20 tons of cast rails in a furnace with a manipulator, and take them to a temperature of 1900 deg. F through programmed steps. Once the required soak time at 1900 was complete, they needed to withdraw the rails and transfer them into a quench bath in under 2 minutes. With their manipulator, and the EPS furnace design, they expect to accomplish this transfer in under 1 minute. These steps give the rails the needed strength and ductility.
EPS proposed a system of replaceable castable pillars on the floor of the furnace chamber to support the load, and provided a total of 24 Eclipse TA025 burners, with 12 firing high on one side and 12 firing low on the other, to create the needed circulation and uniformity. The furnace body was designed to tip up in clamshell fashion, allowing the customers manipulator to bring the rails in from the side, and then unload them from the same side at the completion of the heat cycle for transfer to the quench tank. All aspects of the furnace design, and interfacing with the customer’s manipulator, were handled through a Honeywell HC900 hybrid programming controller with internal PLC.
Our blog visitors have recently had the chance to learn more about how to go about choosing the proper oven for their application (“What to Look For When Choosing an Industrial Oven: Ken Klein Offers Tips for Buyers“) and now readers of Process Heating Magazine will get a chance as well.
