Glassman Europe 2025

Abstract 1: Come to attend SEFPRO CARE® presentation: How to maintain your glass furnace in best operating conditions? 

Production facilities in glass industry are capital intensive and require long investment cycles, while market and energy price have become volatile. Depending on market, glass producers are now facing complex choices in energy sources: using current fossil fuel as natural gas, oxy-gas, hydrogen and completing it by electrical boosting before going to full electric furnaces.

A side effect of reducing GHG emissions by electrical boosting, is the higher corrosion rate of material in contact with glass, especially in melting bath areas. Exposed to these trends, all glass industry (container, flat, specialty, insulation, reinforcement, and display) is adapting its industrial strategy to use their current furnaces in the best way and is considering which furnace technology will be used for the next two decades.

This is why SEFPRO CARE® has developed and propose complete repair solutions to perform hot & cold repairs for any glass market, providing flexibility, reliability in management of industrial asset as are glass furnaces.

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of possibilities offered for hot and cold repairs, using shaped or unshaped products, which are illustrated with two feedbacks from repair work done on regenerator chamber and container glass furnace.  

Abstract 2: Decarbonization Through AI-Powered Batch Monitoring and Model-Based Predictive Control for Electric and Gas-Fired Furnaces

Batch and cullet melting represent the initial stages of the glass melting process. The stability of this process, influenced by factors such as pull, cullet level, glass color, raw material variations, rheological behavior, and the batch charger, is crucial for ensuring optimal glass quality in gas-fired furnaces. The potential instability necessitates continuous 24-hour monitoring and potential corrective control to minimize quality issues. Additionally, the increasing electric boosting levels resulting from the decarbonization process have the capacity to alter glass convection loops, displacing batch downstream in the process.

In cold top melting furnaces, the thickness of the batch plays a pivotal role in insulating the hot glass melt and minimizing heat loss. However, variations in pull and cullet can significantly impact batch thickness. Until now, there has been a lack of systems capable of measuring the actual batch thickness or height and incorporating this parameter into automatic model-based predictive furnace control.

This paper will present the latest developments and results for both gas-fired and cold top electric melters.

Image