Torrey Hills Technologies, LLC Introduces Hybrid Drying/Firing Furnace for Laboratory-Scale Dye Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) Processing

Online, March 15, 2010 (Newswire.com) - This model is specially designed for the drying and firing of nano-sized titanium oxide particles in DSSC application. Extremely flexible and occupying much less floor space, this furnace is perfect for small scale DSSC R&D and university research.

HSH3003-0406 operates from room temperature to 650ËšC and works up to 240mm per minute. It functions as a dryer at temperatures below 200ËšC and is turned into a sintering/firing furnace at higher temperatures. It is equipped with an industrial computer system that enables quick switches between drying and firing profiles, while its manual belt stop mode allows the changing of dwell times. The furnace features a tunnel structure where products are dried and fired through preheating, firing and cooling zones with infrared heating tube as the heating source.

"DSSC as one of the most promising future energy alternatives has attracted extensive interest in the last few years due to its low cost and its independence from scarce resources such as silicon. In response to the special needs from our customers and especially university professors, we decided to design and introduce a hybrid furnace. This small yet flexible and affordable furnace definitely makes the R&D of DSSC more efficient," said Ken Kuang, President of Torrey Hills Technologies, LLC. "Another big plus is that this model is easy to maintain and easy to scale up in the future."