Getting Fruit Drying Right with the Right IR Lamps
Drying fruit is a bit of a balancing act. You need the heat to sink deep into the fruit to pull out the moisture, but if you aren’t careful, you’ll just scorch the outside and ruin the batch. That’s why we build our shortwave infrared lamps the way we do. We handle the manufacturing ourselves—OEM style—which means you don’t have to pay some middleman just to get a lamp that actually fits your industrial gear.
Let’s talk power and voltage
We design these tubes to pack a lot of punch into a small space. If you’re running a conveyor tunnel, the relationship between your voltage and wattage is what really controls the heat. Going with a higher voltage is usually the way to go for longer tubes. It keeps the current draw down, so you don’t have to worry about your wiring getting dangerously hot. You get a concentrated beam that hits the pulp hard. Just a heads-up: high-wattage density puts a lot of stress on your power supply. Double-check that your transformers can handle that initial surge when you flip the switch.
The build: Quartz and Connectors
We use high-purity quartz glass because the heat shifts happen fast. Regular glass would just snap. Most of our lamps use R7s or SK15 connectors. They’re basic, reliable, and should slide right into most systems you’re already using. We also fill the tubes with halogen. Without that, the tungsten filament evaporates and turns the glass black, which kills the heat transfer. One thing to watch for: make sure the lamp is seated firmly in the socket. If it’s loose, you’ll get arcing, and your lamp will burn out way sooner than it should.
Making it work in your line
To get the most out of these, put a reflective backing behind them. It pushes all that energy forward, right into the fruit. You can wire them in series or parallel—whatever your controller prefers. Since shortwave IR targets the water molecules directly, you can shave a lot of time off your drying process. But be careful with your belt speed. If the fruit crawls too slowly, you’re going to burn it. It’s all about finding that sweet spot where the conveyor speed matches the lamp’s output.