PRE-HEAT WITH BROWN’S GAS!
Pre-heating is one of the all time best uses for Brown’s Gas – particularly on materials that require a lot of energy to heat, like stainless steel.
One story I like to tell is about a company that bought a Brown’s Gas machine from China (a 3,000 liter per hour one) for $400,000. They weld large (several feet in diameter) stainless steel tubes and pipes together. Before these pipes can be welded they must be pre-heated. This company was able to underbid their competition and thus became one of the largest welding companies in this field.
This gas allows you to pre-heat in a tiny spot or a whole area and it is clean, only water is the by-product.
Since Brown’s Gas has a ‘cold’ flame, which applies the potential energy directly to the material being heated, the temperature that the material will heat to is dependent on the size of your flame and the material’s ability to dissipate this type of energy.
We’ve discovered that different materials go to different temperatures, the materials that are poor conductors of heat, heat up very quickly when a brown’s Gas flame is applied. We have been able to melt every material we’ve applied to this flame. The higher the melting temperature of the material, the faster this flame heats it up.
The kicker is that Brown’s Gas will vaporize materials like tungsten and diamonds, but it will only very slowly heat water. So you have to take care what you want to pre-heat, because the gas heats every material to a different temperature, mostly depending on that material’s ability to shed heat.