With its many years of experience working with glass manufacturers, Air Liquide can offer a full line of products and services in the following areas:

• Gas applications,
• Gas equipment,
• Technical support and associated services.

Air Liquide helps glass makers improve the efficiency of their processes and the quality of their products while more effectively protecting the environment.

Gas applications have been developed for all sectors of the glass industry, such as packaging, fibreglass, flat glass, tableware and engineering glass. On-site production technology has made it possible to optimise costs.

Melting Glass With Oxygen

With a long list of customer references, Air Liquide can provide the equipment and services you need to get the most out of this technology, including:

• Oxy-gas or oxy-heavy fuel oil burners, optimised for maximum heat transfer to the molten glass (ALGLASS and ALGLASS FC lines).
• A monitoring system for optimum control of combustion, power distribution and safety (FLAMOXAL system).
• An application-specific oxygen supply system ensuring reliable supply while optimising gas purity and pressure, using either a Compact VSA on-site production unit (5 to 150 tons/day per line) or a SIGMA cryogenic unit capable of producing up to 300 t/day per line.
• Various engineering and consultancy services for optimising furnace design and reducing operating costs to a minimum, in particular by using a powerful modelling tool consisting of the combination of the ATHENA code with the Glass Tank Modelling code developed by TNO.
• Technical assistance for on-site installation and commissioning, operator training and oxygen safety.

Other Applications

• Oxygen for boosting melting furnaces
• Temporary conversion of an air-fired furnace into an all-oxygen furnace during regenerator repair
• Installing special oxy-burners in hollow ware feeders to improve performance
• A range of glass-shaping applications, including: edge melting, polishing and cutting using oxy-gas or even oxy-hydrogen burners
• The ALBLACK process for automatically lubricating IS machine moulds. This patented process applies a carbon black deposit to moulds using an oxy-acetylene flame.
• Float glass atmosphere: nitrogen-hydrogen mixtures are produced using on-site equipment
• Silane for coating glass, especially flat glass
• SUNERGY rare gas mixtures, for making high-performance double-glazed insulating windows.

On-Site Oxygen Production

On-site production is the result of an overall development process. It ranges from the design of production units to remote-monitoring procedures and includes the training of operators and centralized spare part management.

Production using non-cryogenic Compact VSA™ units

The principle of operation is based on the properties of certain synthetic zeolites which tend to capture nitrogen molecules by adsorption, while not adsorbing oxygen molecules.

Oxygen may be separated by passing air through a layer of these adsorbents, which is then regenerated by vacuum pumping. This process is known as Vacuum Swing Adsorption.

This technology enables a high degree of operating flexibility at ambient temperature, very fast start-up, and low power consumption.

We offer a full range of units capable of producing from 5 to 150 t/day of oxygen at a purity of 90 % to 94 %, at the following pressures, depending on the application:

• 0.7 bar (10 psi) Gaseous, for oxy-combustion applications (i.e. glass furnaces, etc.)
• 12 bar (174 psi) Gaseous, for paper pulp applications
• 30 bar (435 psi) Gaseous, for electric arc furnaces.

The operating principle is based on the fractional distillation of air at low temperature to extract oxygen. SIGMA line units were optimized to produce oxygen at purities ranging from 90 % to 98 %, and at a pressure of 0.7 bar G (10 psi), without oxygen compressor. They can produce some of the oxygen in liquid form to provide an emergency or back-up supply.

SIGMA units can produce up to 300 t/day of oxygen per line.