Two electrically heated, vertical conveyor ovens will be used by a laboratory to dry moisture from soil samples prior to testing.

The samples will be carried by sheet metal trays. Each oven contains 296 trays with a total live load capacity of 8,000 lb. At the current index rate of 15 seconds, a given tray takes 8 hours to pass from load end to the unload end.

Lewco Inc., Sandusky, Ohio, designed the ovens, which are equipped with three top-mounted heater boxes that provide independent temperature control zones each with a process controller and a redundant high limit controller. The units are equipped with three different operating modes: dual, single and maintenance. The oven can be placed in dual operator mode, where there will be one person loading and one person unloading the oven, for maximum production. The oven may be placed in single operator mode, where one person will both load and unload the oven, during off-peak production times.