Types Of Furnaces

A furnace is never just a furnace. With the advancement of newer industrial trends and the willingness of manufacturers to develop more ‘people-friendly’ machines, there are many types of furnaces in the market today. Astonishingly, these types of furnaces are even sub-divided into smaller categories. Let's state some examples. A household furnace may be an under floor furnace type, a liquid petroleum furnace type, a home furnace thermocouple type, a hydronics furnace type, a conduction-and-steam furnace type, all rolled in one.

What is a furnace? As basic as it may seem, a furnace is any mechanical device that is used for heating. The word furnace evolves from the simple boiler or desktop heater to the kiln to the smelting refineries, and now, even to nuclear or uranium reactors. Furnaces work via the derivation of energy from a combustible source like natural gas, wood and even corn husks. Nowadays, energy is derived from non-combustible fuel sources, as seen in electric arc furnaces and induction furnaces.

Furnace types may be simply broken down according to its use; household, industrial and metallurgical. The different types of furnaces used in homes include different types of gas furnaces (i.e. using natural gas or hydrogen), thermocouple type home furnace, oil furnaces, and electric resistance furnaces. Even in this category alone, there are still different types of furnaces according to the heat distribution process they use. Examples of which include combustion types furnace, condensing and non-condensing types of furnace, cogeneration types of furnace, etc.

The different types of industrial furnaces are convection furnaces, radiant furnaces, reactor furnaces, and the insulator-types furnace. The metallurgical furnaces are probably the best type of furnace when it comes to use and function. They are by far the most specialized of all types of furnaces. Even here, they are still subdivided into types.

In iron smelting, there are types of furnaces used in the production of pig iron and in the reduction of iron ore called blast furnace. Steelmaking furnace types include basic oxygen furnace, Bessemer converter, electric arc furnace, open hearth furnace, puddling furnace and reverberatory furnace. Foundries use industrial-strength furnaces to re-melt metals for tin plate works, rolling mills, and slitting mills. There are also forges and vacuum furnaces.

Furnaces too are further classified into more categories according to the type of steel used in furnace building, and even down to the parts used like furnace venting types and the gas furnace ignitor types.