Ceramic Forum, Glass Manufacturing Technology and Wide-Gap Semiconductors

Feedback control is common control method of the glass melting furnace, but input (for example, increasing the amount of combustion gas) → output (rise in bottom temperature) is very slow due to low thermal conductivity and high viscosity of the molten glass. This makes control difficult. However, ESIII calculates the time of input and output by a computer analyzing of furnace operation data from past few weeks. This predicts the influence on the output by input, enabling feedforward and smoother control. This control technology is currently adopted in 60 furnaces around the world, contributing to energy saving and quality improvement.

ESII runs on computers that use Windows XP operating system. Data transfer and the control itself uses computer networks. Therefore, only a personal computer with a network connection is the only necessary feature to be added in order to implement this system. This makes hardware cost for ESIII to be minimal compared to existing control systems.