Stop Fighting with Your KHS Heating Profiles
Ever pull a bottle off the line and realize the walls are uneven? Or worse, you’re seeing those annoying cold spots and deformations that make a whole batch of preforms useless? It’s frustrating. Usually, it comes down to the IR lamps. If the heat isn’t hitting the preform evenly, you’re just fighting a losing battle with your settings. That’s why we make drop-in replacement lamps. They fit your KHS setup perfectly, but we’ve tightened up the heat spread so you actually get the results you’re looking for. The problem with “standard” lamps Here is the thing: most lamps have a flaw called “end-loss.” Basically, the heat just dies off near the connectors. It leaves you with a thermal curve that looks more like a hill than a flat line. We fixed that by changing how the filament is wound. We put more tungsten toward the edges. Why? Because it flattens the heat. Now, every inch of that PET preform hits the right temperature at the same time, no matter where it sits in the oven. Built to actually last We use high-purity quartz glass because these things go through a lot of thermal shock. They heat up and cool down fast, and cheap glass just can’t handle that. Plus, we fill them with halogen gas. This stops the tungsten from evaporating and clouding up the tube. It keeps the lamp clear and the wattage steady, even after thousands of hours of hard work. Depending on your wiring, you can grab these with R7s or SK15 connectors. We’ve got plenty of voltage and wattage options to hit the exact heat density you need. Just a heads-up: if you go for higher wattage in a shorter tube, it gets hot. Make sure your oven’s ventilation can keep up, or you’ll end up scorching your PET. What this means for your floor When you swap out those OEM lamps for these, the guesswork mostly disappears. You get a stable thermal field, which means way less scrap hitting the bin. Installation is a breeze. It’s a direct swap—just wire them in and tweak your PID controllers to match the new output. If you’re running high-speed lines, you know how brutal the environment is. Our quartz grade is designed to take that beating without burning out early.