Utilization opportunities of perlite have made the product adaptable to numerous applications in the construction, industrial, chemical, horticultural and petrochemical industries. Applications of the perlite include filler, high and low temperature insulation, concrete aggregate, textured coatings, absorbent and carrier etc. Thus, perlite seems to be a very important material. In this paper, thermodynamics analysis of a perlite expansion furnace was performed. Both energy and exergy relations were derived for the considered system. Some parameters, such as losses, irreversibility and design etc., were used for determining the energy and exergy efficiencies. Based on the results of the analysis of the system, the energy and exergy efficiencies are calculated to be 66 and 26 %, respectively. Some recommendations were also made towards increasing the efficiency in the  perlite industry.

The heat-insulated mortar vitrification microsphere expansion furnace was successfully invented in Feb, 2016
by our president, a superior engineer, Li Jiang. In the same year it obtains the patent in practice and in creativity, and the first furnace was used to manufacture in industry in the world. 300 sets of them have been continuously used for five years more or less, which are specially used to manufacture closed pearlites, hollow pearlite vitrification microsphere. In order to insure the vitrification process with self-service management, our company uses six microprocessors to full-automatically control the the technology curve production process of closed pearlite vitrification microsphere expansion, such as the softening of the pearlite mineral sand, the instantaneous gasification of crystallized water, the size of hollow round-forming, case vitrification melt closed waterproof, glass case hardening, etc.