Choosing Right Infrared Solution for Application

Posted on March 29, 2016 by admin

Technically advancing your traditional heaters or dryer with infrared heaters or infrared based dryers are always has been great decision or making up to quality product requirements of the market with lesser cost and time. It’s important to stop for while to understand and give critical thinking over below points:

What advantages will the Infrared heaters/dryers will bring along in my current process?
Will it help in reducing the total processing cycle time?
What will type of materials, which get processed?
What is the physical, physiochemical property, absorptivity, Size, Microstructure and Optical Properties of material?
Can the existing heating/drying system be used?
What will be the space requirement for the new IR installation?

There could be thousands of more questions or concern points that arise can arise in your mind when you think of such changes, hence it’s very important to take help or consult experts or heating consultant or search for heating manufacturer, who is expertise in designing and building infrared based heating solution (partnering with company such as KERONE can help you with best suited IR heater/dryer for process requirements).

First and most important aspect in choosing right infrared based heating or drying solution is understand the material that to will be processed inside the Infrared heater/Infrared dryer, as every material absorbs infrared (IR) differently. The generation of heat on material takes place through the absorption and scattering of radiation. When an electromagnetic wave passes through a medium, it undergoes diffraction from the surface of a particle whose refractive index differs from that of the medium. This phenomenon is known as scattering or weakening. The scattering and absorption depends on the size form of particles, micro-structure and optical properties of material under processing and also on the wavelength of the radiation of the Infrared emitter. On the other hand the radiation absorption in material depends mainly on the water content, thickness, and physicochemical nature of the material and wavelength of the radiation.

Hence choosing the correct wavelength for the Infrared heaters is very critical. The infrared emitter which generates or radiates the desired wavelength becomes very important part of the infrared heating/drying systems. Choosing correct emitter ensures the most effective heat work that will yield reduced cycle time i.e. achieve the desired temperature very quickly. To understand the basic IR wavelength requirements it’s important to understand the Planck’s Law, the Max Planck reported that “the spectral distribution of radiation from a blackbody source that emits 100% IR radiation at a given single temperature”. According to Planck the higher the object temperature the greater the amount of IR energy will be produced

Industrial Heating System for Biscuit and Cookies Baking

Posted on February 26, 2016 by admin

Biscuits and cookies have been part of our life since long time, we all love and like to eat some or other type of biscuits or cookies due its brand, taste, health benefits and many other reasons. One thing that we all love about them is their crispness, crispy and crunchy biscuits have always been first choice as biscuit and cookie lover. If it’s not crunchy then as consumer we never felt like we have some good biscuit or cookie and some it’s not baked properly, even if it’s over crunched and browned lots then also it gives taste like its burned while baking. Hence baking of biscuits and cookies become very important and critical for them to taste at best.
Baking is one of very critical process in biscuits and cookies manufacturing plants, and it’s defined in food processing as process to heat the food to reduce its moisture completely and give them sustainable solid structure, so that they can last for longer time duration. In short the baking is kind of cooking food by the manner of direct heat. Most important part or need of baking is heat that is applied to biscuit or any other item to be baked. Hence the process of baking is completely dependent on the heating system and heat temperature that is applied in baking.
The conventional heating system has been used in baking process from longer time but having many limitations such as :

Longer time to bake
Larger area in for baking system
Response time is huge
Temperature control is difficult
Fuel consumption is high
Irregular baking

due to above limitations the conventional heater based baking ovens have not able to deliver the desired quality of product. But in past there was no choice but to use the conventional heating technology in baking process, but as the time has change an introduction of infrared and microwave heating systems started getting popularity in industrial heating and market needed well baked high quality product.
Higher productivity with good quality in lesser time can be achieved at lower opex cost. Conventional heaters based baking ovens had always faced issues of incomplete baking as the conventional heating/drying technique used to heat the biscuits and cookies from the outer surface to inner, this many time lead to baking outer surface fully and the inner part left unbaked. This ultimately resulted in customer complaints about the biscuits and cookies. Microwave heating systems provided best solution to this problem as it heats from inside- out, so microwave based baking ovens produces biscuits and cookies which were well cooked from inside but the out crust of the biscuits and cookies still not able to take the texture that should have. Hence the engineers had thought of the combining infrared and microwave heating system as new hybrid solution to specified need of the industry.
The Infrared Heating System works similar to that of conventional heater with advantages such as the higher speed of productivity in lesser time, requires smaller space, highly controllable and fuel efficient. This bakes the biscuits and cookies from outer crust and gives it the texture that is needed.
Hence hybrid system works best with infrared heater drying outside-in and at the end using microwave heating system to heat inside-out, hence giving perfectly baked crispy and crunchy biscuits and cookies ready to delight the biscuit and cookies lovers.

Infrared (IR) heaters for efficacious manufacturing

Posted on October 8, 2015 by admin

Manufacturing processes is changing day by day, doing business has become very challenging over time and new concepts of manufacturing process improvement had brought traditional way of production and all major and minor steps of manufacturing process under strict scrutiny. Concepts such as process improvement, lean management, Poke-yoke, Six Sigma and Just in time (JIT) have coerced manufacturer/team of experts to study and analyze the every process in terms of time required in every piece of product, space utilization factor, efficiency, economy of scale etc. Different concepts started working on different part of manufacturing processes, such as lean management and process improvement started by analyzing every necessary and unnecessary process involved in complete manufacturing process, entire manufacturing process is divided into small stages and then later every stage is further sub-divided to analyze worthiness of every single man power or machinery and all required steps are taken to improve or eliminate the process step that is not adding value to total manufacturing process and help to improve ROI.

As part of industrial manufacturing process such as heating, drying or welding those required the input process material to heat at desired process to achieve the desired quality output product. The conventional heating/drying techniques which results in required more time and energy to heat the input material, the conventional heating/drying takes longer time hence the batch size must be large as to match the future demand , this require excess inventory. The Conventional heating system heat complete chamber to achieve the desired level of heating at input material, hence this requires large amount of energy to be wasted. The conventional haters are huge in size which required larger floor space.

KERONE, itself have been manufacturing heating solution from last 40years and has witnessed the transformation in manufacturing process, hence to help our clients and society with better and more environmental friendly heating solution, we have adopted new technologies such as Infrared for heating and drying solution.

Infrared heaters/dryers uses infrared frequencies of Electromagnetic spectrum, these infrared frequencies fall just above the visible frequencies, Infrared heaters does not product heat as source but it produces heat at source i.e. material under processing. The infrared heater/dryer produces the heat by using the surface of input material, since it does not required to heat the air for transfer of heat it results in the rapid transfer of heat and causes material to get heated in very short span of time. These capabilities of Infrared heating/drying system help in achieving the more efficacious manufacturing by adding following advantages:

1) No time is wasted in heating, hence batch sizes are small even it’s suitable for the continuous heating which ultimately no need to maintain large inventory.

2) Since heat is generated as source itself, so it does not and no air is heated it results in lower energy consumption and it makes it green solution.

3) As it heats the surface of input material and air temperature is not required to maintain so it does not require large chamber size, hence infrared heaters offer better floor space utilization.

4) Zoning within the continuous infrared heating system allows not implementing different heating arrangements.

Infrared heaters/dryer had helped the manufacturers to achieve the great level of saving in terms of cost, time and space and makes the manufacturer to produce competitive product.

Gas fired Vs Electric fired Infrared heating System

Posted on June 5, 2015 by admin

IR radiation is generated using one of three different technologies: electric, gas catalytic, or radiant gas (and radiant gas systems are mainly used for space heating rather than process heating).

Advantages/features	Gas Fired	Electric Fired
Lower-cost energy source	Yes	No
Uses less energy when only surface heating is required	Yes	Yes
Provides well-controlled, low-intensity heat	Yes	Yes
Provides highest-intensity heat	No	Yes
Intensity can be easily adjusted for different products	No	Yes

Electric infrared technology offers more flexibility than gas-catalytic regarding the fancied heating force. Electric and gas-catalytic IR advances have particular qualities that make them pretty much proper relying upon the material and the sort of process. Gas-catalytic IR frameworks by and large oblige a more prominent capital venture than the other two, yet they have lower working costs.

To choose which technology is ideal for a particular item or process, various parameters must be viewed as, including item quality, working costs, and generation rates. In processes that oblige fabric and paper drying, gas-catalytic technology has a marginally predominant heating productivity as a result of the force of the radiation it transmits and the measure of time the item uses in the stove. As a rule, a gas-catalytic IR framework is a decent decision for materials that oblige a considerable measure of vitality, for example, a few materials, in light of the fact that its fuel costs are lower than those of electric IR.

Electric IR is more suited to delicate materials that requires a less-exceptional heat or to processes that need brisk reaction times or shorter blasts of serious radiation from the heating gear

Gas-catalytic IR technology has an altered force thickness that relies on upon the temperature of the fuel-oxygen response; it for the most part does not surpass 2 kilowatts for every square foot (kw/ft2—that is 22 kilowatts for every square meter [kw/m2]). Interestingly, electric IR stoves can rapidly and effectively differ the force of emitted heat while accomplishing force densities of up to 37 kw/ft2 (400 kw/m2)—a trademark that makes them predominant for quickly heating metals.

Both the Methods of IR heater firing holds its advantage and limitation it totally depends on the process that is being needed for.