From welding to food production and beyond, the majority of industries utilize heat to some degree. But which methods are the most common in manufacturing, and how do they work? Here’s an insight into three popular heat processes used in various industries today.
The Automotive Industry: Deflashing Injection Molded Products
Injection molding is a mass production process where automotive mold manufacturers inject molten plastic materials into a cavity – or a mold. The molten plastic cools into the mold before hardening, at which point the finished product is extracted. This method enables the production of large volumes of parts, mainly to manufacture thousands of identical pieces.
Next, deflashing is the removal of residual stainless, titanium, rubber, or plastic materials utilized in the initial injection molding. The deflashing process removes the leftover residue in a centrifugal barrel finishing machine. This method is one of the quickest and most cost-effective to deflash many parts.
- This YouTube video shows the process of deflashing.
The Pharma and Food Industries: Tamper-Proof Seal and Sleeve Shrinking
Shrink sleeves are the plastic tamper-proof seals found on medicine bottles and food jars. These assure consumers that the product is safe and has not been tampered with. Hot air tunnels are often used to apply shrink sleeves to products; their process is optimum for neck-banding tamper evidence and shrink-sealing full body labels and sleeves on small containers.
With hot air tunnel applications, conveyors, conveyor belts, and wear strips must be suited to withstand high temperatures, typically ranging from 200 °F to 600 °F.
- Check out this YouTube video to see the seal-shrinking process in action.
The Coffee Industry: Roasting Coffee Beans
Every day, 2.6 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, making coffee the second most traded raw material after oil. All that coffee requires roasting – a process that starts with green coffee beans, which have been processed and dried.
During coffee roasting, temperatures are raised from about (356 °F to 482 °F) and heated for 7 to 20 minutes. The number of minutes depends on the type of roast, be it dark or light. The roasting process creates coffee’s signature scent; it reconstitutes the beans’ amino and sugar acids, producing up to 1,000 aromas from one cell.
Several different roasters exist for coffee roasting, but they all use heat – whether drum roasters, tangential roasters, or centrifugal roasters. Modern coffee roasting machines use gas, though given today’s climate change-focused and sustainability-minded consumers and manufacturers, alternative heating processes are gaining traction. For instance, the Leister Coffee Roaster PROBAT is an excellent example of an electric air heater for roasting coffee rather than gas.
Gas-powered coffee roasters are more commonly used due to the fact that the roasting process is typically better. However, development into electrical coffee roasting technology continues as the world becomes significantly more focused on green, sustainable industrial and commercial practices.
Conclusion
Heat is used in many industries for an even greater number of applications. For example, the food, pharmaceutical, and automotive sectors all rely on heat processes to manufacture the products they create worldwide. While many more industries utilize a broad array of other heat and hot air methods for various purposes in manufacturing, the three detailed above are the most common across the planet.