Book Description

A Glass Furnace Model (GFM) was developed under a cost-shared R & D program by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in close collaboration with a consortium of five glass industry members: Techneglas, Inc., Owens-Corning, Libbey, Inc., Osram Sylvania, Inc., and Visteon, Inc. Purdue University and Mississippi State University's DIAL Laboratory were also collaborators in the consortium. The GFM glass furnace simulation model that was developed is a tool industry can use to help define and evaluate furnace design changes and operating strategies to: (1) reduce energy use per unit of production; (2) solve problems related to production and glass quality by defining optimal operating windows to reduce cullet generation due to rejects and maximize throughput; and (3) make changes in furnace design and/or operation to reduce critical emissions, such as NO(subscript x) and particulates. A two-part program was pursued to develop and validate the furnace model. The focus of the Part I program was to develop a fully coupled furnace model which had the requisite basic capabilities for furnace simulation. The principal outcome from the Phase I program was a furnace simulation model, GFM 2.0, which was copyrighted. The basic capabilities of GFM 2.0 were: (1) built-in burner models that can be included in the combustion space simulation; (2) a participating media spectral radiation model that maintains local and global energy balances throughout the furnace volume; and (3) a multiphase (liquid, solid) melt model that calculates (does not impose) the batch-melting rate and the batch length. The key objectives of the Part II program, which overlapped the Part I program were: (1) to incorporate a full multiphase flow analytical capability with reduced glass chemistry models in the glass melt model and thus be able to compute and track key solid, gas, and liquid species through the melt and the combustion space above; and (2) to incorporate glass quality indices into the simulation to facilitate optimization studies with regard to productivity, energy use and emissions. Midway through the Part II program, however, at the urging of the industrial consortium members, the decision was made to refocus limited resources on transfer of the existing GFM 2.0 software to the industry to speed up commercialization of the technology. This decision, in turn, necessitated a de-emphasis of the development of the planned final version of the GFM software that had full multiphase capability, GFM 3.0. As a result, version 3.0 was not completed; considerable progress, however, was made before the effort was terminated. The objectives of the Technology Transfer program were to transfer the Glass Furnace Model (GFM) to the glass industry and to promote its widespread use by providing the requisite technical support to allow effective use of the software. GFM Version 2.0 was offered at no cost on a trial, six-month basis to expedite its introduction to and use by the industry. The trial licenses were issued to generate a much more thorough user beta test of the software than the relatively small amount completed by the consortium members prior to the release of version 2.0.