These atmosphere furnaces are available with temperature ranges up to 1150°C and with various process atmospheres including hydrogen and nitrogen. BTU designs and manufactures inline controlled atmosphere furnaces and hydrogen furnaces for a number of applications including:

Muffle construction for high purity N2 atmosphere operation

• <2ppm O2 Inert atmosphere

• National Fire Protection Association NFPA 86, NFPA-79 and UL508a safe atmosphere compliant

Left Center Right Trim

• Improves part uniformity and yield

• Uniform eutectic across plates

Gas Barrier

• Superior atmosphere separation

• <2ppm O2 Inert atmosphere

Cooling Educators

• Shorter foot prints

• Controlled cooling of heavy loadsa

BTU is the industry leader in controlled atmosphere furnaces for continuous furnaces. Excellent atmosphere purity is achieved through the use of BTU's patented gas barrier technology. In addition, BTU's unique educator technology can be used to enhance cooling or control process atmosphere. The end result is superior efficiency, superior performance, and superior thermal uniformity.

BTU's controlled atmosphere belt furnaces and custom furnaces feature BTU's proprietary WINCON™ control system. WINCON features a simplified user interface and incredibly powerful analytical capabilities.

BTU's Fast Fire, due to its muffle-less design, offers reduced power usage by allowing rapid heating and cooling between uses. Further, the design supplies excellent atmosphere flow for binder removal, coupled with precision temperature control to meet the process control needed in thick film firing. In addition to the standard air atmosphere configuration, Fast Fire is available for nitrogen atmosphere operation. For cost-effective high-temperature processing in air or nitrogen Fast Fire is the best choice.

Advantages of Fast Fire's muffle-less design:

• Short heat-up and cool-down times
• Enables shutting down the furnace on weekends or off shifts.
• No costly muffle replacement

Atmosphere Control

BTU's Fast Fire conveyor furnace features precise atmosphere control of the critical process parameters within the furnace. The firing furnace gas panel is designed for ease of use while minimizing operator intervention.

Firing section atmosphere is introduced at the cooling section and flows counter to product travel. Process emissions are removed from the process chamber via independent, venturi-driven, exhaust plenum assemblies. The plenum assemblies extend across the entire width of the process chamber for uniform extraction of burnout gases. Entrance and exit gas curtains are provided with top and bottom ratio flow control valves.

Temperature Control

BTU's muffle-less belt furnace maintains precision control by utilizing segmented heated sections that are programmed and controlled by BTU's proprietary Wincon, Windows-based, furnace control system and Intellimax furnace controller.

Inline dryers are available as a standard offering of BTU's custom furnaces group. The dryers can be configured with radiant heaters (ceramic fully-enclosed-coil, FEC), convection plenums or a combination thereof. The convection dryers are produced as stand-alone equipment, but can also be integrated with a BTU Controlled Atmosphere Furnace or Fast Fire to provide pre-heating or binder burn-out. Typical applications for convection dryers include epoxy curing, polymer thick-film curing, and low-temp ceramic drying. Drying and curing processes are typically at 200°C or below and in air atmosphere. Higher process temperatures, and other process atmospheres, are available with BTU's Fast Fire or Controlled Atmosphere Furnaces.

All of BTU's inline dryers include top/bottom heating configurations as well as a range of cooling options, including, no cooling, controlled water cooling, or controlled convection cooling. The dryers feature thermal insulation optimized for both process control and energy savings. Optional condensate entrapment is also available for binder burn-out applications.

Using an inline dryer versus a batch dryer is compelling for a number of reasons including superior process repeatability, increased throughput, and reduced cycle time.

Convection Dryers – Custom Configured – High Reliability

The foundation of the Convection Dryer is the same convection plenum that is used in our industry-leading reflow ovens. The advantage is that a custom layout can be configured while retaining the reliability of a volume product. We've shipped thousands of reflow ovens with numerous plenums (top/bottom) per each resulting in hundreds of thousands of plenums operating 24/7 with BTU's lifetime heater/blower warranty – a statistic few custom-configured products can boast.

The BTU convection dryer can be configured for very wide widths up to 48″ and very long heated sections. The convection plenums can be configured with closed-loop convection control allowing for maximum process control. The closed-loop configuration can have each plenum controlled individually or group process sections together for ease of use and cost-savings, even in custom furnaces.