Case Study

Case study: Ceramic Infrared Heating System for PVC Pipes

A European customer needed to heat different sizes of PVC pipes. They were looking for a complete infrared heating solution. The customer knew they wanted a frame with infrared elements mounted inside in a fixed position. This frame would encase the pipes. The critical part however was ensuring that PVC didn’t melt. This created a challenge because the PVC pipes were different thicknesses and were 100mm in diameter size. They ranged in thickness from 4 to 10mm and would also be rolling at the same time the heating elements would be operational.

Ceramicx combined all the customer’s variances and produced one heating system that could work on all the variations of PVC pipe. Temperature sensors were put into each of the 10 heating zones allowing the customer to ramp the heaters up or down based on the PVC thickness. An additional 100mm heating zone was added to adjust for larger PVC pipe lengths. Our infrared HTE heaters targeted the PVC pipes to ensure that they could soften prior to the next process and smaller zoning could be used if necessary for temperature control.

Ceramicx completed the infrared heating system in approximately 2 weeks, including all the work from welding through to load testing every circuit.