Tunnel Kiln Thermal Regulation and Brick Stack Collapse Prevention in Brick Production
2026-08-27
Thermal system regulation is the core foundation of stable operation forindustrial tunnel kilns in the brick and tile manufacturing industry. It refers to adjusting variable operating parameters inside the tunnel kiln according to the characteristics of fired brick products and actual production demands, so as to form a scientific and reasonable internal thermal environment.
In daily industrial production, the precise temperature control of tunnel kilns is realized through multiple standardized operational adjustments. Manufacturers mainly adjust the frequency of three core fans: smoke exhaust fan, heat exhaust fan, and kiln door fan. Meanwhile, operators regulate the opening degree of pipeline gates, control the kiln car feeding speed, and implement top kiln coal feeding operations to stabilize the kiln internal temperature.
To ensure the normal and efficient operation of automated tunnel kilns for brick firing, four essential operating conditions must be met strictly. First, the internal combustion calorific value of green bricks must be uniform and stable, which guarantees consistent heat supply during the firing process. Second, the internal kiln temperature requires long-term stability; the temperature of each position in the preheating zone, firing zone, and cooling zone must fluctuate within the standard allowable range. Third, the kiln feeding system shall remain stable, with unchanged product types and internal heat proportioning. The interval of kiln cars entering the kiln is fixed, ensuring stable heat absorption of green bricks in the preheating and firing zones per unit time. Fourth, the physical and chemical indicators of finished brick products must maintain stable standards.
Brick stack collapse is a common and harmful fault in tunnel kiln production. Severe stack collapse will force the kiln to stop firing, causing huge production losses. In addition, manual troubleshooting and maintenance under high-temperature kiln conditions bring great safety risks to on-site workers, seriously hindering continuous and stable production.
There are four main causes of tunnel kiln brick stack collapse. Firstly, unstable brick stacking quality is the primary factor. The long-term moving of kiln cars during preheating and firing will loosen unqualified brick stacks and eventually lead to collapse. Secondly, excessive green brick moisture content caused by insufficient drying seriously affects the structural stability of brick stacks in the kiln. Thirdly, unilateral settlement or severe deformation of kiln rails leads to tilting kiln cars, making the upper brick stacks lean against the kiln wall and collapse. Fourthly, falling refractory bricks from the kiln wall and kiln top will jam between the brick stack and kiln wall, causing stack deformation and collapse. Once abnormal conditions are found during kiln car pushing, operators must stop feeding immediately, inspect fault causes, and implement targeted solutions.
Corresponding preventive and solving measures are summarized for stable production. Factories need to optimize the green brick drying process and strictly control the moisture content of bricks entering the kiln. Secondly, standardize brick stacking operations, strictly follow the principles of flatness, straightness and stability to ensure qualified stack quality. Thirdly, conduct regular inspection and maintenance on kiln rails, kiln walls and top refractory bricks, and timely repair and replace damaged components to eliminate hidden dangers.
Related questions
2
How Full-Automatic Ceramic Slab Production Lines Solve Core Pain Points in the Modern Brick and Tile Industry？
The global brick and tile manufacturing industry is undergoing profound digital and intelligent transformation in 2026. Traditional ceramic slab and terracotta production has long relied on semi-automatic equipment and manual intervention, restricting the development of medium and large ceramic building material enterprises. Most traditional production lines face universal industry pain points, including unstable product quality, high labor dependence, low material utilization, and excessive defective rates. With the continuous upgrading of international construction material standards and the tightening of environmental protection policies, backward manual and semi-automatic production modes can no longer meet large-scale, standardized, and eco-friendly production requirements.
In traditional ceramic slab manufacturing, multiple links such as slurry mixing, pressing forming, glazing, and high-temperature firing require manual operation and manual parameter adjustment. Human errors easily cause inconsistent slab thickness, uneven flatness, and unstable density, leading to a high defective rate and serious raw material waste. In addition, rising global labor costs further compress the profit margins of ceramic building material factories, making intelligent and full-automatic production an inevitable trend for the brick and tile industry’s future development.
To completely solve the bottlenecks of traditional ceramic slab production, the Full-Automatic Industrial Ceramic Slab Terracotta Production Line has become a targeted intelligent manufacturing solution for the brick and tile industry. This independently developed integrated production system realizes full-process unmanned automatic operation, covering all production links from raw material processing, slurry mixing, pressing forming, automatic drying, digital glazing, high-temperature firing, edge trimming, and quality inspection to finished product packaging.
Equipped with a professional PLC intelligent control system and high-precision photoelectric sensing modules, the production line supports one-key start, automatic parameter calibration, real-time data monitoring, and automatic fault alarm. It completely avoids quality fluctuations caused by manual operation, effectively reducing the defective rate of ceramic slabs. Meanwhile, the advanced continuous compaction molding technology and constant-temperature firing system ensure uniform density and flatness of finished products, greatly improving raw material utilization and production stability.
Different from traditional rigid production equipment, this full-automatic production line integrates energy-saving and environmental protection design, featuring low energy consumption and low-noise operation. It fully complies with international industrial environmental protection standards, helping ceramic manufacturers reduce energy consumption costs and labor costs simultaneously, and significantly enhance core market competitiveness in the global building materials market.
3
How to Select Reliable Automatic Clay Tile Press Machine？
Clay roof tiles have maintained irreplaceable market advantages in the global construction industry for decades. Compared with metal roof sheets, plastic tiles, and concrete tiles, clay roof tiles feature natural raw material texture, excellent weather resistance, ultra-long service life, and superior thermal insulation performance. In emerging markets including Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America, the demand for residential and rural infrastructure construction is booming, which greatly drives the development of the local clay tile manufacturing industry.
In the past, most small and medium-sized tile factories adopted handmade or semi-mechanized production modes. These traditional production methods rely heavily on skilled workers, resulting in unstable tile specifications, low daily output, and extremely high defective rates. In addition, rising labor costs and strict local construction quality standards have made traditional production modes gradually eliminated by the market. More and more factory investors and old tile plant renovators are turning to fully mechanized and automated production lines to achieve standardized production, cost control, and stable product quality.
The core foundation of clay tile production is raw material processing and tile forming. Most regional production areas have abundant and easy-to-collect raw materials, mainly including natural clay, pure soil, and industrial mud. However, many novice investors ignore raw material pretreatment processes. Impurities such as stones, gravel, and dry soil blocks in raw materials will directly affect the forming effect of tiles, leading to surface cracks, uneven thickness, and irregular edges of finished tiles. Therefore, matching professional raw material crushing, stirring, and filtering equipment is a prerequisite for high-quality tile production.
Among the entire tile production line equipment, the automatic clay tile press machine is the most critical core forming equipment, determining the final shape, density, and yield of clay tiles. Different from traditional manual molding and simple extrusion equipment, modern automatic tile press machines adopt integrated mechanical, pneumatic, and hydraulic transmission systems, which can complete precise one-time pressing and forming of green tiles. This equipment can flexibly produce various mainstream tile products on the market, including standard roof tiles, edge tiles, ridge tiles, and small floor tiles, meeting diverse architectural design needs.
We independently develop and supply three mainstream types of automatic clay tile press machines to adapt to different investment budgets and production scale needs: mechanical tile press machines suitable for small workshops, pneumatic tile press machines with cost-effective performance, and high-precision hydraulic tile press machines for large-scale industrial plants. The daily production capacity of our equipment covers 2000 to 50000 pieces, fully covering small family workshops, medium-sized professional tile factories, and large-scale fully automated tile production bases.
All series of tile press machines are designed with localized operation logic for foreign workers, featuring simple operation, stable operation, low failure rate, and convenient daily maintenance. There is no need for professional and technical workers to operate for a long time, which effectively reduces the factory’s labor training costs and post-operation maintenance costs. Moreover, our equipment supports customized mold replacement, and customers can adjust tile specifications and styles according to local market popular styles to improve product market competitiveness.
It is worth noting that high-quality tile pressing is only the first step of qualified finished tile production. The green tiles pressed by the machine contain a certain proportion of water, which cannot be directly fired. Unreasonable drying and firing processes will still lead to a large number of defective products. To solve the one-stop production problem for customers, we also support complete supporting equipment and technical solutions, including professional tile drying chambers, roller kilns, tunnel kilns, and full-process production technical guidance. We can formulate exclusive production line configuration schemes according to customers’ factory site area, local climate conditions, raw material characteristics, and target output, helping customers quickly build profitable tile production projects.
5
How Does Raw Material Processing Determine the Final Quality of Fired Clay Bricks?
In the global fired brick manufacturing industry, sintering and forming processes often receive the most attention, yet raw material preparation — the very first step of the production line — is the hidden core that determines 70% of finished product quality. For clay bricks, ceramic tiles and various clay-based building materials, the uniformity, plasticity and particle gradation of raw materials directly affect blank forming stability, drying shrinkage consistency and final sintered strength.
Many brick plants still rely on conventional single-shaft or dual-shaft mixers for raw material processing for brick manufacturing. These machines can only complete basic mixing, but fail to perform fine refining, extrusion kneading and granulation. As a result, uneven material mixing leads to inconsistent internal stress in brick blanks, low compactness, and frequent defects such as deformation, cracking and low strength after drying and sintering. In recent years, with the rising demand for high-quality building materials worldwide, upgrading raw material processing systems has become a core strategy for brick factories to improve yield and reduce production costs.
Industry data shows that brick plants that upgrade their raw material mixing system to integrated mixing & granulation equipment can reduce blank defect rate by more than 30%, and significantly improve the compressive strength and appearance consistency of finished bricks. For modern brick production lines pursuing stable quality and high efficiency, choosing a professional twin shaft mixing granulator is no longer an optional upgrade, but a necessary investment to maintain market competitiveness.
Our Solution: SJB Series Twin Shaft Mixing Granulator for Brick Manufacturing
As an upgraded multifunctional raw material processing equipment specially developed for clay brick production lines, ceramic tiles and various clay product manufacturing, our SJB series twin shaft mixing granulator is optimized on the basis of conventional dual-shaft mixer structure. It perfectly retains stable material mixing performance, and integrates extrusion kneading, fine cutting and granulation functions in one unit, realizing one-stop raw material processing from coarse mixing to fine refining.
This advanced equipment thoroughly mixes and refines raw materials such as clay, shale and coal gangue to form a uniform, compact and dense material structure. It effectively improves the forming quality of brick and tile blanks, increases product compactness, and greatly reduces blank deformation caused by internal stress, ensuring stable and high-quality finished products.
Equipped with a pneumatic clutch, the machine can flexibly adjust production capacity and running status according to different production demands. Featuring reasonable structural design, simple operation, strong durability and trouble-free long-term operation, it is an essential and reliable core device for modern brick and tile manufacturing production lines.
We provide three standard models to match different production scales:
- SJB250X80: Capacity 15-20 m³/h, Power 37 kW, Overall size 35001000680 mm
- SJB300X80: Capacity 20-30 m³/h, Power 45 kW, Overall size 43001000700 mm
- SJB400X100: Capacity 30-40 m³/h, Power 75 kW, Overall size 57001200850 mm
If you are planning to upgrade your raw material processing system or build a new brick production line, welcome to contact us for a tailored solution and detailed quotation. Our technical team will provide professional equipment selection guidance according to your raw material type and production capacity demand.
6
Why Does Fast Drying Cause Cracks in Green Bricks?
Green Brick Cracking is one of the most common and troublesome quality defects in modern automatic brick stacking system production lines. The majority of adobe surface cracks occur during the post-molding drying stage, which is mainly triggered by excessively fast green body drying speed. For professional brick and tile manufacturers, effectively solving rapid drying-induced crack issues is essential to stabilize brick finished product yield, reduce waste rate, and cut overall industrial production costs.
In actual operation ofautomatic brick coding and stacking equipment, two core operational problems triggergreen body fast drying cracks. The first issue is unstable drying system parameter fluctuation; abrupt and large-scale changes to drying chamber temperature and humidity curves will disrupt standardized drying logic. The second issue is excessive drying acceleration before the adobe passes the brick drying critical point, which destroys the natural moisture balance between the internal structure and surface of the raw brick body.
Drying medium temperature is a key indicator that determines the moisture removal capacity of drying equipment. In the industrial brick drying process, a higher medium temperature means stronger water evaporation capacity and faster dewatering speed of green brick bodies. However, uncontrolled high temperature or sudden temperature spikes will trigger irreversible cracking problems.
When the drying medium temperature is excessively high, the surface moisture of the green body evaporates rapidly, while the internal moisture migration speed is far slower than the surface evaporation speed. This creates an unbalanced shrinkage state: the green body surface shrinks significantly, whereas the internal structure shrinks slightly. The internal structure will generate continuous tensile stress on the surface layer of the adobe. Once the tensile stress exceeds the surface structural strength of the green body, surface cracks will appear immediately.
Sudden temperature rises in the drying chamber pose the greatest threat to green body integrity. Abnormal temperature surges will sharply accelerate surface dewatering and shrinkage, while the internal green body cannot complete synchronous shrinkage in a short time. The excessive internal stress directly destroys the surface structure, resulting in widespread cracking of brick adobes after drying.
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