Buying a glass tempering furnace is the largest investment for a glass processing enterprise. It could determine an enterprise's market value, the distribution of customer base, and overall profitability. Being in the glass processing machinery business for over 20 years, LandGlass has seen numerous successful or unsuccessful cases of investment in glass tempering furnaces. This article intends to help those who plan to invest in glass tempering machine to properly evaluate the operating environment and their own situations before making a purchasing decision.
1. Before you purchase a glass tempering furnace, you’d better have a clear view of the product positioning.
The customers of the tempered glass market can be divided into Type B customers (who place more regular orders) and Type C customers (mostly are small and irregular orders). Type B customers place engineering orders including glass for doors, windows and curtain walls. These products generally have standard specifications; Type C customers refer to the customers in the home improvement market that can be further divided into customers for high-end system windows and for general household windows. Among them, both Type B curtain wall and Type C system windows have very high requirements on optical quality and glass surface quality. As such, the requirements for machine configurations are also high. Customers should choose the glass tempering furnace with the appropriate configurations according to their product positioning.
2. What are the criteria typically used to determine the right tempering furnace?
Capacity matching: The capacity of the glass tempering furnace should match the estimated annual overall production output. Taking LandGlass A2850 glass tempering furnace as an example, to produce 5mm Low-E glass [ E=0.08 ], the production capacity is 15-18 loads/hour. The annual output is approximately 1.50 million square meters of glass. An enterprise may calculate the required capacity according to the estimated annual output and select the appropriate model of the glass tempering machine.
Floor space: Different types of glass tempering furnaces, such as flat glass tempering furnace, bent glass tempering furnace, flat and bent bi-directional glass tempering furnace, combined tempering furnace, and continuous tempering furnace have very different longitudinal sizes. Customers should take into consideration the actual space available when choosing their models. Besides, the space for the temporary storage of unfinished glass products needs to be reserved in advance.
Power load: Different glass tempering furnace models needs different installed power. Taking 5mm clear glass as an example, the installed power of the A2850 single chamber is about 1300kw while the installed power of a combined glass tempering furnace is approximately 2400kw. Enterprises should consider the installed capacity of their existing transformer and the possibility of expansion when choosing the machine models.
What machinery does your competitor have: In line with the consideration of competitive differentiation, the capacity of your glass tempering furnace generally should be larger than that of your competitors’ in the region. For instance, if your neighboring competitor is equipped with a glass tempering furnace for glass size 2.4m*5m , you should consider a glass tempering machine for glass size 2.4 m*6 m or 2.8 m*5 m.
3. Forced convection glass tempering furnace or radiation glass tempering furnace?
When it comes to forced convection, we have to talk about Low-E glass. Low-E glass is known for its low- Emissivity properties. In short, it reflects a lot of radiation heat , making it difficult to heat up quickly with radiation heating. When using a radiation glass tempering furnace to heat the Low-E glass, the radiation heating takes too much time and the uneven heating between the upper and lower glass surfaces seriously affects the quality of glass. While the forced convection glass tempering furnaces take the air convection approach, directly blowing heated air to the glass surface, overcoming the reflection of Low-E glass in radiation heating. Therefore, when the volume of coated glass tempering accounts for more than 30% of an enterprise’s orders or there is a great variety of glass tempering tasks, it is recommended to choose a convection glass tempering furnace. Even for the clear glass, the performance of a convection tempering furnace is significantly better than that of a radiation tempering furnace. Hence, It is recommended that enterprises should buy forced convection glass tempering furnaces.
