Energy Balance

Glass manufacturers are constantly under pressure to enhance production, improve quality, meet increasingly strict emission regulations and reduce costs and investments. Glass Melting is a key element within the glass production process from batch preparation to product packaging and the main goal is to cost optimize glass melting processes. In the last 40 years there have been various trends to achieve this cost optimization and the main drivers can be highlighted as follows:

• Higher melting efficiencies
• Longer durability of the melting furnaces o Better fuel utilization or fuel reduction
• Glass quality improvements
• Emissions reduction (NOx, SOx and particulates)

The Energy Balance Modul provides a comparison of all the energy flows supplied and removed in a thermotechnical process. The thermal balance allows conclusions to be drawn regarding energy efficiency and the nature and scale of energy losses.

The more detailed the recording of the balance parameters, the easier it is to find starting points for technical and technological improvements. One of the major features of the thermal balance of melting furnaces is the link between the upper furnace and heat recovery.

For detecting energy losses in a melting furnace, this module is also able to compare various parameters for a bath with the current setup. In this way, for example, the effect of using a booster can be calculated beforehand before the furnace is rebuilt at considerable expense.

Variants

This function can be used to compare any number of energy balances. This provides you with a direct overview of what effect the individual changes are having. To create variants, you must first determine the wall losses. Then use the tabs to move to the entry pages and change the entry parameters.

To compare all the values in a table with the original values, click on the left button "calculate". If you want to have the results of the comparison of the individual energy balances displayed, click on the Text link below. The data will be displayed in a new window, for greater clarity.

Oxy-Fuel Boosting

This program item is one of the most interesting in the calculation of energy balances. On the basis of the original balance (original data), the wizard creates a new variant with the simulated incorporation of additional oxygen burners (Oxy-Boosting).

O2 Conversion

This function creates a new balance variant. In this variant, the firing of your furnace will be converted from gas/oil to pure oxygen. In this process, the parameters exhaust gas temperature, temperature of air preheating, type of combustion air, and lambda value and wall losses will be automatically adjusted.