Industry 4.0 in glassmaking
How Industry 4.0 can improve container glassmaking Technology experts give their view on how Industry 4.0 will impact the glassmaking industry. Erik Muijsenberg, Vice President, Glass Service
Further automation of the glassmaking process is inevitable. It is more difficult to find motivated people to work in the hot glass industry and more automated production will lead to higher yields and thus also more efficient production using less energy. However the Industry 4.0 I see just as a Title above what has been going on for some time already. It will help us to move it forward and get the attention of top management in glass factories.
2. Do you expect the digital concept to be embraced by the hollow glassmaking industry? Yes it will and yes it does already: automatic swabbing is an easy example. The next step is integrating the whole process as the hot and cold end are often separated. The benefits will be energy savings, higher yields, higher flexibility with a smaller workforce.
3. What does your company offer its customers in terms of the Industry 4.0/digital glassmaking concept? Glass Service has developed a full automatic control for glass melting and conditioning that has been installed for more than 18 years. It is called the Expert System III and is now transferred into Expert System 4.0 as we integrate more and new sensors such as batch imaging to make the process more automatic and showing it is part of the Industry 4.0 movement.
ďż˝ Erik Muijsenberg, Vice President, Glass Service.
4. Has digital glassmaking become an important concept at your company? Do you have an R&D team devoted to it, for example? Yes for us Industry 4.0 has focused our work more in this direction with our R&D focusing on developing new sensors such as new HD Infrared Camera and online redox sensors to be added into our control system Expert System 4.0.
5. How has your technology evolved to embrace the digital age? Some of our products were fully oriented to Industry 4.0 even before people had heard about Industry 4.0.
6. Are there any negatives to the digital age? I cannot see any negatives. The only negative is after some time of more automation there is no easy
way back anymore. For example, with automatic swabbing, operators lose experience of how to swab. But this process is again inevitable and progress is made in this way. There was a time furnaces were controlled manually without temperature measurements by Thermocouples, but today nobody thinks anymore how to control a glass melting furnace without knowing the measured temperature.
7. What is your vision of a container glass factory in five to 10 years time? I see more integration and automation for the actual production process. You will only need operators to maintain equipment and machines to keep it going. You can compare for example today float glass production with container glass, there was already more automation in the forming process, so more glass is produced with fewer people.
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1. How important is the Industry 4.0/digital concept to hollow and container glassmaking?
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08/02/2018 11:14:12