High temperature tube sintering furnace is a widely used heat treatment equipment in the fields of materials science, metallurgy, ceramics, chemical engineering, and new energy. Let's take a detailed look at this type of furnace below!

A commonly used high-temperature tube furnace for sintering (click on the image to view product details)

1. Structural principle
High temperature tube sintering furnaces usually adopt a double-layer furnace shell structure, with an inner layer of high-purity alumina polycrystalline fiber furnace, an outer layer of metal shell, and an integrated air cooling system in the middle to achieve rapid temperature rise and fall and surface temperature control. Its core components include:
Heating element: using silicon carbon rod, silicon molybdenum rod or resistance wire, generating heat through current, with a maximum working temperature of 1800 ℃.
Temperature control system: integrating artificial intelligence PID regulation technology and microcomputer intelligent control, supporting multi-stage program temperature control (such as 50 stages), with a constant temperature accuracy of ± 1 ℃.
Furnace tube material: High purity alumina ceramic tube, 310S stainless steel or quartz tube, suitable for experimental atmospheres such as argon and nitrogen.
Vacuum and atmosphere control: The air inside the furnace is pumped to a high vacuum degree (10 ⁻¹ Pa to 10 ⁻³ Pa) through mechanical pumps, diffusion pumps, or molecular pumps, and inert gases (such as argon and nitrogen) or reducing gases (such as hydrogen) can be introduced to form a protective atmosphere or participate in chemical reactions.

2. Performance advantages
Accurate temperature control: Equipped with a good temperature control system, it can achieve precise control of the temperature inside the furnace, ensuring that the material is at a constant temperature during sintering, melting, or synthesis processes, and improving product quality.
Easy to operate: By setting parameters such as temperature, time, and atmosphere through the control panel or computer program, automation control can be achieved to improve work efficiency.
Safe and reliable: The furnace body has a sturdy structure, good sealing, and is equipped with safety devices such as overheating protection, power-off protection, and gas leakage alarm to ensure the safety of the experimental process.
Wide applicability: It can handle various materials such as metals, ceramics, glass, plastics, etc., to meet the experimental needs of different fields.
Energy saving and efficient: Adopting a double-layer furnace shell structure and high-performance insulation materials, the outer surface temperature is low, and the energy-saving effect is good.

3. Application scenarios
Material sintering: Powder or granular materials are formed into dense blocks or parts through atomic diffusion and bonding at high temperatures, widely used in the preparation of ceramics and metal materials.
Melting treatment: providing a sufficiently high temperature to melt the material in the furnace to meet specific process requirements, such as metal melting and glass preparation.
Material synthesis: Under high temperature conditions, by introducing reactive gases such as nitrogen and hydrogen, chemical reactions between materials are promoted to generate new compounds or materials, such as the preparation of silicon nitride ceramics.
Heat treatment: Annealing, normalizing, tempering and other heat treatments are carried out on materials to improve their microstructure, properties and surface state, and extend their service life.
Experimental research: By adjusting parameters such as temperature, atmosphere, and pressure inside the furnace, simulating different experimental conditions, studying the behavior, performance changes, and reaction mechanisms of materials at high temperatures, and promoting the development of materials science, metallurgy, chemical engineering, and other fields.

A tube sintering furnace with a temperature of up to 1700 ℃ (click on the image to view product details)

4. Operating standards
preparation:
Design a temperature rise and fall curve, with a heating rate not exceeding 10 ℃/minute and a cooling rate below 15 ℃/minute.
Clean the environment, check that the mechanical pump oil line is above the marked line, remove the end caps, and clean the furnace tube with a vacuum cleaner.
Push the sample boat into the middle of the furnace (with a constant temperature length of 10cm), plug in the insulation furnace plug, install the gas furnace flange, and confirm that the sealing gasket falls into the groove.

Fill with working gas:
According to the process requirements, select gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen, and perform leak detection to confirm that there is no gas leakage.
Adjust the gas flow rate and pressure to ensure a stable atmosphere inside the furnace.

Furnace opening operation:
Turn on the main power supply of the tube furnace and the power supply of the startup panel.
Set the temperature and time program, and start the heating power supply.
During the heating process, pay close attention to the pressure gauge inside the furnace. If the pressure is too high, immediately open the outlet valve to release the gas.

Normal shutdown:
After the program runs, the main heating power supply automatically stops.
When the temperature drops below 100 ℃, close the main valve of the gas cylinder and the inlet and outlet valves of the tube furnace.
Turn off the main power supply of the wall mounted tube furnace and remove the sample boat.

Safety precautions:
It is strictly prohibited to enter workpieces containing corrosive, volatile, or explosive gases into the furnace for processing.
Do not operate at excessive temperatures, otherwise it will shorten the service life of the equipment.
The workpieces should be evenly stacked and placed about 100-150mm away from the heating element.
Operators are not allowed to leave their posts without authorization and should always pay attention to whether the working condition of the electric furnace is normal.Click to learn more tube furnaces! Or click on online customer service to learn more about product information!