Getting Heat Right in Ultra-Long Glass Score Tunnels
If you’ve ever dealt with heating a glass score line, you know the struggle. You need the heat to be perfectly even. But once your tunnel gets really long, standard lamps just can’t keep up. That’s where we come in. We build custom infrared units that stretch past 2 meters. The goal is simple: kill the cold spots and make sure every inch of that glass sheet feels the exact same temperature.
The struggle with length
Here’s the thing about quartz tubes—they have a breaking point. You can’t just stretch a single filament forever. To get past that 2-meter mark, we use a series of matched shortwave infrared lamps. We sync the wattage and voltage across the whole line so you don’t get “striping.” You know what I mean—those frustrating temperature drops that happen in the gaps between lamps. Instead, you get a solid wall of heat.
The nuts and bolts
We use high-purity quartz because it can actually handle the stress of this kind of heat. For these long runs, we usually go with high-voltage setups. It keeps the current under control and means we don’t have to use bulky, oversized wiring. We also stick to industrial connectors like R7s or SK15. Why? Because when a lamp eventually goes, you want to swap it out in seconds, not spend the afternoon rewiring your entire tunnel.
A few things to watch out for
Now, a 2-meter array puts out a massive amount of heat. It’s great for speeding up your throughput, but it’s hard on your equipment. If your ventilation is lazy, your chassis is going to take a beating. You’ve got to make sure your cooling fans are actually doing their job to pull heat away from the housings. If you don’t, your connectors will fry way sooner than they should. We design these to be drop-in replacements. We map the electrical load to whatever panels you’re already using, so you don’t have to rip out your power grid. Just wire it in, set your PID controllers, and you’re good to go.