The LA-series furnace is an economical general purpose furance for dental production applications. Nitrogen process gas is controlled much like a clean room: pressurized gas is pushed through the heating chamber insulation providing a pre-heated, laminar flow for a uniform, stable atmosphere. Precise temperature is maintained by control thermocouples above the belt in each zone quickly sensing changing conditions. IR quartz heating lamps inside the chamber instantaneously adjust their output to achieve tight temperature control: each load through the furnace sees the same temperature.

Computer Controlled. The furnace is operated via TPS FurnaceControl software installed on a robust industrial rack mount furnace computer. The responsible engineer can easily vary process parameters using the sophisticated PID and power control parameters in the software. An almost infinite number of recipes and profiles can be labeled and stored for each dental appliance process for ready access on the furnace computer. The operator simply starts the furnace, loads the recipe. In about 15-30 minutes the software will signal to begin processing product.

Laboratory and Production Applications. The LA-Dental series furnace is an efficient tool for many dental production and laboratory uses. With its tight temparature control and nitrogen controlled atmosphere, it can process substrates, wafers, metal, ceramic, glass, or polycarbonate parts for dental bonding, epoxy and polymer curing, thick film firing, ceramic bonding, as well as titanium and porcelain veneering, and metal brazing, annealing, tempering and sintering applications. Its performance characteristics are ideal for dental laboratory work or production applications where consistency and repeatablility are important. Rapid startup and response to recipe changes make it uniquely qualified for development work and applications where a number of processes are run.

Specialty Brazing. The LA-Dental series furnace is particularly suited for dental brazing applications including silver alloys with copper, zinc, tin, cadmium and/or nickel. Zone 1 quickly brings the parts to the first hold temperature. Zone 2 will precisly hold the parts for the duration requried to achieve activation of flux systems. Zone 3 spikes the temperature for sufficient time so alloy materials properly melt and flow into the joint. The CACT cooling tunnel cools at a rate for the liquid to solidify in place and control distortion in a nitrogen environment to produce bright, high strength joints.

About Model Choices. The LA-Dental series furnace is most commonly ordered as an LA-309N with a 9" wide belt. A narrower 6" belt and a wider 10" belt are offered for special applications. The standard dental furnace is configured with three (3) zones (Z1=7.5", Z2=15", Z3=7.5"). Zone 1 is configured to ramp parts quickly to operating temperature. Zone 2 is longer for dwell time. Zone 3 is short and can be used to extend Zone 2 dwell, begin controlled cooling, or spike the temperature, if necessary. If finer resolution is requried, the funace can configured with four (4) equal 7.5" zones (LA-309X) to provided greater flexibility.