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Home / Industries / Glass and Ceramics

Glass and Ceramics

Universal Dynamics provides the Glass and Ceramics industry with a complete process control system for your furnaces and forehearths. Our 30+ years of operation and process control experience has enabled us to effectively solve your tough control loops and provide the most effective glass furnace and forehearth control systems available.

Controlling glass furnace temperatures and levels along with the forehearth temperatures has always been a difficult task due to:

  • Changes in production rate affect process gain and time lag for the temperature control loops
  • Long temperature response time causes conventional controllers to cycle on set-point changes
  • Combined heating/cooling control is nonlinear
  • Thermal and mechanical properties of glass change with temperature

Replacing your conventional glass furnace and forehearth controllers with our GlassMax Advanced Regulatory Control system will increase furnace capacities and reduce operating cost. The GlassMax system is based on the award winning predictive/adaptive BrainWave controller. The BrainWave controller develops a high fidelity model of the process, including nonlinearities and dead time, and uses this model to calculate the control changes that will bring the process to set point as rapidly as possible. Due to it's adaptive capabilities it can adjust to new process dynamics resulting from production rate or mode changes.

Universal Dynamics has successfully installed our GlassMax systems in many glass plants within North America producing such products as:

  • Container Glass
  • Fiberglass
  • Light Bulb Glass
  • CRT Glass
  • Automotive Glass

The GlassMax system has consistently allowed the companies that are using it to control their furnace and forehearth temperatures to within 0.5 to 2°C of set point and to achieve stable production following product changes in half the time they achieved with conventional control systems.

Related Literature  

Articles/Papers

  • GlassMax™ (PDF)
  • Predictive-Adaptive Temperature Control of Molten Glass (PDF)
  • Advanced Model Based Control for Continuous Process Industries (PDF)
  • Adaptive Control of Glass Bottle Manufacturing  (PDF)
  • Glass Container Maker "Gets Smart" with Control Technology (PDF)

Sample Projects

  • Consumers Glass, Lavington, BC (HTML)