Increasing furnace efficiency and reducing NOx & CO2 emissions are today's glassmakers first concerns for being competitive in their market. Innovative solutions are investigated at all levels. They include pretreating the batch to melt glass more efficiently, improving combustion control to reduce NOx & switching to natural gas for lower carbon emissions. For glass production & particularly for flat glass, Air Liquide & AGC Glass Europe have developed recently a highly innovative technology, Alglass Heat recovery to recover most of the heat of the flue gases. This presented four challenges at once: Float furnace conversion to oxy-combustion; Staged oxy-combustion burner technology; Oxygen preheating; & Natural gas preheating. This paper presents the results of the industrial prototype and the various approaches and methodologies that have been launched to make this technical partnership a success. This technology enables reducing operations costs with a profitable investment cost.
