Ardagh Group – incandescent liquid glass
Wear-resistant solution for unstoppable flow of incandescent liquid glass
The website says, “Ardagh Group Benelux in Dongen produces over 1.2 billion products a year.” How much that is only becomes apparent when you do the math backwards. That’s 38 bottles and/or jars per second! So we are talking about one of the largest glass factories in Europe. Quite an honor that Wivé Techniek may contribute here. We recently carried out an interesting project in the basement of the factory. Niek Paanen, Supervisor General Technical Maintenance, tells more about it:
“Glass is made from sand, lime and soda, with some additives like sulfate, dolomite and from cullet from recycling. When white glass is made, 50% of the mixture that glass is made from consists of glass from the bottle bank and 90% from green glass.
“Basically, the furnace remains active continuously for ± 15 years.
Recycled glass is an inexpensive raw material because it melts at a lower temperature than raw materials. So it costs less energy. And the great thing is, you can reuse glass indefinitely. It doesn’t change its composition like plastic, for example.” “The production of glass is a fully continuous process, which continues 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In principle, the furnace remains active continuously for ± 15 years. So that means that all supply and disposal lines must also be available at all times.”
But moving parts don’t last 15 years, do they?
“No, but we have to do maintenance and replacement without stopping the process. Meanwhile, the furnace continues to produce glass as usual. So when we replace a conveyor belt or transport chute, we have to come up with another solution temporarily. In the disposal, we then work with bins and forklifts. But of course that’s not ideal. We therefore have a lot of parts in stock so we can react quickly and keep downtime as short as possible.”
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Basically, the furnace remains active continuously for ± 15 years.
What is the role of Wivé Techniek?
“Wivé helps us with wear prevention. The last project was to replace the pipes for the discharge of liquid glass. As mentioned, the furnace keeps supplying glass all the time, so even if we convert the machine for another product. The liquid glass from the furnace is then temporarily diverted. It flows through a thick-walled discharge pipe to the basement, where it is returned to the beginning of the process after cooling. That drain pipe suffered a lot of wear from the red-hot glass mass. We had to repair it after only three or four years by welding pieces on it. This is where we enlisted the help of Wivé. They supplied a special new pipe, welded on the inside with a wear-resistant coating. We expect that this will at least partially solve the wear problem. The pipe has been in there for less than a year now, but it should last at least twice as long. And maybe even ten or 15 years! That would save a lot of hassle.”