Glass-melting furnaces wear automatic calculation development and implementation

The work presented here has been effectuated during an internship at Saint-Gobain Isover, which is a company that manufactures glass wool, used for the insulation, in particular of the buildings. The glass wool is made thanks to furnaces (electrical or flame) to melt the glass. These furnaces are worn by the glass corrosion and that can induce issues and a limited lifetime of the furnace, so this wear has to be controlled. ??The aim of this work is to create new tools, especially as curves, to study and control this wear. These new tools must be simple to use and the most automatic possible to save time. The achievement of this project can be separated in two parts. The first one, necessary to do the second part, is to homogenize the files in which the user write the wear values that he measures in the plants. This consists in a new Excel file in which several calculations are done automatically thanks to formulas, to satisfy the goal of time saving. This file have one sheet for each part of the furnace (the tankwall, the bottom, the throat and the forehearth) because measurements are performed on all these parts. The user writes in this file some data like the wear he measures or the thickness of the layers of materials of the furnace, and several other data are automatically calculated from that, like the thickness remaining if the wear is considered for example. ??The second part of the work is to plot curves thanks to the data of the file of the first part. There are curves regarding the wear of the tankwall and the forehearth and curves regarding the number of overcoating (addition of a material layer to increase the total thickness of the tankwall). Some curves are used to focus on a single plant and others are used to make comparisons between the plants. Zones are defined for the tankwall of the electrical and flame furnaces to be able to know which part of the furnace is more impacted by the wear, and to compare the same zone when a comparison is effectuated between plants, in order to be relevant. The user can choose which zone have to be displayed on the plot thanks to the implementation of a filter with checkboxes. The same system is done to choose which plant must be compared in the comparison plots.