Custom Ultra-Long IR Heaters for Glass Annealing Tunnels
If you’re running a glass annealing tunnel, you already know the struggle. You need a perfect thermal gradient across a huge distance, or you’re looking at internal stress and broken glass. But here’s the problem: when your layout needs heating units longer than 2 meters, the stuff you find in a catalog just doesn’t work. That’s where we come in. We build these ultra-long infrared units specifically for those long, continuous setups. The struggle with long-form arrays Scaling a heating element up to 2+ meters isn’t as simple as just making it longer. You start dealing with voltage drops and weird heat distribution. If you aren’t careful, the center of the tube ends up colder than the ends. We spend a lot of time dialing in the wattage and voltage to stop that from happening. We usually go with a continuous run of high-output quartz elements. The goal is balance. You can’t have “hot spots”—if one area gets too intense, it’ll warp your glass, and then you’ve got a real mess on your hands. The nuts and bolts We use heavy-wall quartz tubing for a reason. At high temperatures, thin glass wants to bow under its own weight. This keeps things straight. Depending on how deep the heat needs to soak into your glass slab, we’ll set these up as medium-wave or short-wave emitters. We also beef up the end-caps and use industrial-grade connectors. Thermal cycling is brutal on wiring, and the last thing you want is a burnout in the middle of a production run. Getting them installed (and what to watch out for) The great part? These are drop-in replacements for those old-school resistive heaters. They take up way less space and they warm up fast. But a word of warning: these 2-meter units are fragile. During installation, one slip with a wrench and crack—there goes your quartz tube. You have to make sure your mounting brackets are dead-on. Any mechanical stress on the glass is a recipe for disaster. And don’t forget the air. These units pump out a massive amount of radiant energy. If your cooling system isn’t sized right, the ambient heat around the tunnel chassis will just build up and build up. Make sure your ventilation can actually handle the load.