This analysis highlights the key success factors in hollow glass manufacturing, showing how large-scale producers can overcome common operational challenges, enhance process stability, and consistently achieve high quality, energy efficiency and cost savings targets.

To abate CO2 emissions, optimizing the glass conditioning is a huge area of opportunity.

Forehearth firing systems, known for their low efficiency, typically rely on combustion, often hindered by the absence of preheated air. While oxy-gas combustion offers significant improvement, it's not the ultimate solution.

Electric heating, such as submerged electrodes (molybdenum or tin oxide), has proven effective but requires cooling systems, impacting overall efficiency.

BDF has developed a solution based on silica-carbide radiative elements. These elements replace the flame from pencil burners, directly radiating heat to the glass.

This eliminates contact between the heating elements and the glass, along with the associated heat losses from flue gases.

Since radiative elements require no cooling, additional efficiency can be achieved.

Each control zone utilizes thyristor controllers to power the elements, with a unique "side-by-side" configuration enabling independent power control on both the left and right sides of the forehearth.

This precise control is essential for achieving the high thermal homogeneity required in processes like NNPB.

Glass cooling is achieved through refractory dumpers/flaps driven by actuators, allowing for both axial and lateral cooling control.

The BDF control system and relevant SCADA integrate heating and cooling regulation.

Reducing the carbon footprint of the inherently energy-intensive glass making process is a major challenge. It will require a progressive technology transition, starting from incremental improvements of existing technologies, and heading towards groundbreaking innovation in the long term.

Hybrid & Electrical furnace technologies are progressively being adopted as the first step along this journey toward decarbonation. Nevertheless, these new technologies bring many technical challenges, refractories behaviour and corrosion in the melting zone being among the most critical ones.

In the first part, this presentation will address the improvement of corrosion resistance through XeBOOST™ material installation in the most critical areas. Then, the benefits of SEFPRO GUARD® monitoring system to assess the corrosion profiles of refractory blocks and to correlate them to furnace operating conditions will be highlighted. Finally, the benefits of combining new SEFPRO materials with advanced monitoring technologies will be illustrated through a complete solution approach.

As the steel, metals and glass industries accelerate toward decarbonization, the hybrid furnace is emerging as a critical technology — combining traditional fossil-fuel firing with electrical or hydrogen-based heating to cut CO₂ emissions without compromising process performance.

But hybridization also brings new challenges: fluctuating temperature zones, unproper heat distribution, and higher demands for repeatable and accurate control.

That’s where advanced thermal imaging, particularly MWIR-B and NIR-B (Near-Infrared-B) technology based, is making a real difference for operations. The paper will introduce some case studies how to get benefits from this technology.

As the need and desire for packaging to become lighter increases this presentation will discuss some of the developments, opportunities and challenges associated with reducing the weight of glass containers including the sustainability benefits, the need for technical standards to reflect the advancements in this area and key points to consider when planning lightweighting projects.

Glass Futures is a not-for-profit, membership-based, research organisation, based at its Global Centre of Excellence in St Helens, UK. The remit of the organisation is to enable its members from across the glass supply chain and beyond to collaborate in areas which affect all parties, with a particular focus on decarbonisation of the glass-making process and its upstream and downstream activities.

At the heart of the new Glass Futures’ facility is a 30 tonnes/day pilot-scale glass furnace, which has been designed to enable the industry to develop and trial new technologies at an industrially relevant scale, without risk to their commercial manufacturing assets, thus providing increased confidence for manufacturers looking to invest in low-carbon technologies such as alternative fuels, CCUS technologies and new raw materials.

The first phase of trials to be undertaken on this new pilot line will investigate a range of alternative, low-carbon fuel scenarios for glass furnaces, including hydrogen, biofuels and electric melting.

In this paper, an overview of the facility is provided along with an overview of findings from these initial trials into low carbon fuel scenarios. Future opportunities to make switching to low-carbon fuel scenarios more commercially attractive for the glass industry, such as dynamic fuel switching and pyrolysis technologies, will also be explored.