Heraeus Infra-red Oven Saves Space and Time On Stoelzle Spray Line

Carbon infra-red emitters cure paint on perfume bottles.

A carbon infra-red oven from Heraeus Noblelight has helped Stoelzle Flaconnage to achieve significantly faster curing of organic paint sprayed onto to highly decorative perfume bottles. Its installation has also saved valuable space compared with an alternative hot air oven at the company“s Knottingley glass manufacturing plant.

Stoelzle Falconnage was founded as J.W. Bagley in 1871 and became part of the Stoelzle Glass Group in 1994. Over the past few years major investments have been made both in production and in glass decoration techniques so that today the Yorkshire factory is a state-of-the-art facility, supplying decorated glass bottles to the prestige spirits and design market and perfumery and personal care companies. It currently operates five production lines and produces in excess of 110 million glass containers per annum It offers a range of decoration techniques, including acid etching, automatic and semi-automatic silk screen printing. The range also includes a twin spraying line for organic colours, where different spray guns can be used in one process, achieving multi-coloured finishes.

When it was decided to adapt a mothballed ceramics spraying machine to provide much needed additional organic paint spraying capacity to meet the requirements of a large contract, it was realised that there was insufficient space to accommodate a conventional warm air oven. At the same time, Stoelzle engineers required that paint drying times should be reduced to match increased production line speeds. After speaking to their specialist paint supplier, Perfomance Paints, of Tewkesbury, they contacted Heraeus and tests were carried out at the Heraeus Application Centre. These demonstrated that, using carbon infra-red, coatings on glass containers delivered at a line speed of 4.4m/min, could be cured in 90 seconds as opposed to the 25 minutes required in a warm air oven.

As a result, a five zone oven was installed at the Knottingley site. This sits over the existing conveyor system and each zone consists of two side infra-red modules and one top module. Each side module contains four, 7.35kW, twin tube, carbon infra-red emitters and each top module one, 7.35kW, twin tube, carbon infra-red emitter. The emitters have a very fast response time of less than 2 seconds, so that the oven can be quickly switched off when there are gaps in the line or in the event of unanticipated line stoppage. The oven can be simply profiled to meet three different heights of bottle by simply switching in pairs of side emitters. Zones 4 and 5 are manually controlled, so that they can be switched to a stand-by level during line stoppage.

„Apart from meeting our requirements for space saving and faster curing times, the new oven has also allowed us greater control over paint curing,“ explains Shayne Carr, project engineer at Stoelzle. „It is also more energy efficient than the warm air alternative and the emitter controllability means that we can quickly adapt to changes in bottle size.“

Heraeus specialises in the production and application of high quality energy sources covering the electro-magnetic spectrum from ultraviolet to infra-red. It has over 40 years experience in infra-red technology and offers the expertise, products and systems to provide efficient and effective solutions to drying, heating and curing problems throughout industry.

Kontakt
Heraeus Noblelight Ltd
Ian Bartley
Buildwas Rd, Unit 1, Millennium Court, Clayhill Industrial Estate
CH64 3UZ Neston, Cheshire
0151 353 2710
hng-presse@heraeus.com
http://www.heraeus-noblelight.com/infrared

Pressekontakt:
Heraeus Noblelight GmbH
Dr. Marie-Luise Bopp
Reinhard-Heraeus-Ring 7
63801 Kleinostheim
+49 6181/35-8547
hng-presse@heraeus.com
http://www.heraeus-noblelight.com/infrared