About 120 people attended a conference to mark the finale of the Prime Glass project.
The Prime Glass project has been an important part of the last three years of many people’s life, and concluded with a conference in Rapallo, Italy, organised by Stara Glass.
Stara Glass President, Mr. Arnaldo Messori, introduced the conference and thanked all the people involved. Then, 10 papers were given by participants of the Prime Glass project.
The aim of the Prime Glass project was to to trial and demonstrate technologies that would improve the environmental impact of the glass industry, reducing NOx, CO2, CO sulphur oxides and dust emissions and energy consumption.
It developed and tested applicable and effective solutions for NOx containment at the source during the combustion process, and combustion optimisation in regenerative and hybrid glass furnaces by increasing heat exchange
The speakers and their titles were:
Bianca Maria Scalet, (Nicola Favaro) (Ufficio di Gabinetto Ministro per la Coesione Territoriale e il Mezzogiorno / Stazione Sperimentale del Vetro) – Glass melting: emission sources – Implementation of Best Available Techniques (BAT) and Associated Emission Levels
Francesco Prosperi (Stara Glass) – The Prime Glass DeNOx solutions in the present scenario of the glass industry NOx containment technologies
Stara Glass’ technical director gave a wide and precise analysis of all current technologies for NOx primary and secondary containment in glass industry.
Ernesto Cattaneo (Stara Glass) – The technologies of the Prime Glass project
The Stara Glass R&D engineer and chairman of the event, who has been deeply involved in most of the project activities, proposed a synthetic overview of the project technologies, thus introducing the successive speeches.
Simone Tiozzo, (Walter Battaglia, Alessandro Migatta) (Stazione Sperimentale del Vetro) – The Multipoint Continuous Monitoring system and its application in the Prime Glass project
The SSV engineer introduced an innovative monitoring system that has been used to collect the experimental data of the operating glass plant with a multipoint parallel acquisition.
Milena Marchegiani, (Luca Tosini, Adelvaldo Bussolati) (Bormioli Rocco) – A customer’s experience of the Prime Glass technologies and the open problems in glass furnaces’ emissions control
One of the most interesting parts of the conference has been the opportunity to see the Prime Glass technologies from the point of view of the end-user. It has been lucky, for the project partners, to test the experimental plants together with the extremely skilled Bormioli Rocco personnel. Doctor Marchegiani’s brillant presentation outlined example of the priceless technical sodalice we have been able to develop within the project, and not just among the partners.
(Carlo Cravero), Michele Pallante, Alessandro Spoladore (Università degli Studi di Genova) – Simulation of glass production system components with gas recirculation using CFD and lower order models
UNIGE Engineers Pallante and Spoladore brillantly exposed the contribution of Professor Cravero’s CFD computing team to the project
Alessandro Mola (Stara Glass) – An analysis of the environment and energy performance of the Prime Glass technologies and their future developments
Dr. Mola, the scientific responsible of the project and actual conceiver of the two NOx containment technologies we studied, presented a detailed analysis of the project results and their possible future developments.
(Nicola Favaro), Walter Battaglia (Stazione Sperimentale del Vetro) – The Life Cycle Assessment applied to the Prime Glass technologies
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a standard procedure that enables an objective evaluation of the environmental impact of a certain product or process by means of the analysis of raw materials and energy flows and the definition of performance indicators. SSV technicians and scientists have been able to perform this detailed analysis to the Prime Glass technologies, here exposed by Dr. Battaglia.
Sauro Pasini, (Sandro Merlini) (RJC) – Designing low NOx combustion systems for end port glass melting furnaces using an integrated CFD based approach
Dr. Pasini, one of the event's most prestigious speakers, applied his combustion design expretise to provide an analysis applied to regenerative glass furnaces, that included all most important solutions and winked to the future ones.
(Carlo Cravero), Santo Cogliandro, Alessandro Spoladore (Università degli Studi di Genova) – Perspectives from numerical modeling and video data acquisition for glass furnace optimization and management
The less visible, actually infrared, yet important part of the project regarding thermography and image analysis was described by the field experts Dr. Cogliandro and Dr. Spoladore.
Giorgio Minestrini (Stara Glass) – Innovative plant solution connected to the Prime Glass technologies: state of the art and perspectives
The Stara Glass’ R&D Engineer has, among other things, supervised the installation of every plant of the project. He introduced the future developments of the technologies that proved to be products ready for the glass market, but still have interesting margins of improvement.
Event organiser Ernesto Cattaneo, said: “The project is formally over, strategic waste gas recirculation and high-efficiency air-staging are among the big things to evaluate, to optimise the operation of regenerative glass furnaces, and our thermography/image analysis activity allowed us to make our design more accurate and our technologies more performing.
“Personally, after three years of very satisfactory yet hard work, I want to thank all the wonderful Stara Glass, SSV, UNIGE and external people we have been working with, for the passion and the target-oriented mentality everybody has been using.”
More information http://www.primeglass.it
