Advantek Engineering Inc.

Rocking Ovens provide a continuous motion glass melting system to improve homogeneity for compositions with known homogeneity issues such as Chalcogenides.   The fully automated touch screen Operator Interface allows 8 different ramp/soak routines that are directly tied to one of 4 servo extremely smooth driven motion routines of rocking, vertical, horizontal, or a fixed angle. 

The rocking motion has fully adjustable negative angle, positive angle, velocity, acceleration, deceleration, and dwell time allowing each temperature segment to have a particular routine.  The dual zone [left and right] temperature controller communicates via Ethernet to the touch screen Operator Interface to provide an easy to understand visual control with all parameters on one page.  As glass melting can be a time consuming process that is often left unattended, dual redundant thermocouples are used with an over temperature alarm that will disconnect oven power if required.  Data Acquisition also provides detailed melt parameters and the collection period is easily changed via the touch screen or Web Server. 

To further support unattended operation or operation in hooded ventilation system, the Operator Interface can be viewed or fully controlled either locally or remote via a Web Server including data file collection, email, push updates, and server synchronization.   For many customers this provides cost savings for not requiring constant monitoring of costly melts via the remote access and notifications.

Some fiber optic glass draw or extrusion applications require a controlled or inert draw atmosphere that can be precisely maintained and monitored to assure glass production of the best quality. 

Many glasses including Chalcogenides and IR glasses cannot vent into the environment and must be exhausted and filtered.  Modular draw ovens such as pictured above utilize dual containment with both a sealed hot zone and a sealed external enclosure.  Glass exiting also passes through a cooling lower containment zone with cross purging and exhaust.  Such configurations allow many combinations of purging, exhausting, and negative/positive pressure setups to further assure containment and a controlled glass softening environment.   To further support our focus on modular system design, the ovens can be designed on indexing linear or rotary stages allowing multiple oven configurations (each with their own XY pass line adjustment) to be quickly and precisely moved into position for different glass draw requirement. 

For these applications, we utilize our custom designed spiral wound heating elements around high temperature alloy muffles to provide optimum thermal uniformity and easy cleaning with low contamination, as no ceramic elements are in the glass zone.  Advantek Engineering Inc. has extensive experience designing custom ovens in many configurations, temperature ranges, and environment constraints.   

When your applications require small high power ovens with precise uniform heat zones, we have multiple solutions that have proven their capability in laboratory and production environments.   Our 600°C oven utilizes a high temperature alloy integrated element annealing zone with a short hot zone. 

This design optimizes size control and produces strong fiber or cane in an oven with an OD of just Ø90 mm and which can be driven by an SSR at line voltage not requiring special transformers or complex control systems; and allowing direct retrofit into many existing draw tower systems with minimum system changes.  

Advantek Engineering Inc. has over 50 different draw tower oven designs, some general and some very specifically designed for a unique customer application.  Unlike some oven suppliers, we sell complete custom designed systems with controls and customs ovens with elements  made from solid ceramics, vacuum formed, custom spiral wound solid ceramics, Diffusion, NiChrome, Kanthal™, Moly D, Silicon Carbide, Molybdenum Disilicide, and induction. 

Most designs have a 1200°C temperature limit which meets the needs of most soft glass draw processes; however we provide custom ovens with higher temperature ranges particularly designed for specific processes.  Our designs address preform size along with fiber or cane size to determine ideal heat zone and annealing zone design as well as muffles or chokes that best suit your application. 

Because we provide complete fiber draw towers as well, we can also provide custom oven mounts and alignment systems as well as multiple oven linear or rotary slide systems.

For our Glass Extruder Systems we custom design our ovens to have high power and high thermal inertia to allow smooth and uniform temperature changes and long dwell periods. 

Depending on the application, our oven vary both in temperature ranges up to 1400°C and in applications with more sensitive glasses we use multiple zone ovens with discreet zone baffles to keep the upper section of the glass at lower temperatures to maintain the quality and decrease devitrification.   We also provide extruder ovens as pictures above with purging, exhaust, and sealed chambers to allow atmospheric and environmental control.