Tony Wheatley continues his examination of the global glass industry with an insight into the technology at the heart of glass production – furnaces.
Glass is described as a uniform amorphous solid material that results when the viscous molten raw material cools to below its glass transition temperature.
Raw materials for glassmaking are delivered to the plant as fine grained materials that are carefully blended into a batch before entering the first stage of the process – melting.
Although incremental improvements have been made to combustion systems, regenerators, refractory and batch handling that have extended furnace campaigns, decreased their size and increased energy efficiency, at the heart of the process is the regenerative melting furnace which remains essentially unchanged.
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