Glass Service a.s. (GS) has been at the forefront of the Glass Industry 4.0 and AI revolution for several years, showcasing its expertise through the implementation of its Model Based Predictive Supervisory Expert System ES III™ and NIR furnace camera, along with unique AI vision software.
Currently, GS has surpassed 400 installations worldwide. Remarkably, in certain European countries, over 50 percent of all glass furnaces are now under full ES III™ control. This encompasses various sectors, including float, container, tableware, fibreglass and special glasses.
Furthermore, ES III’s utilization downstream is steadily increasing, with approximately 300 forehearth installations already in operation. Stay tuned for more exciting developments to be unveiled in the near future.
One of the company customers provided a testimony illustrating the advantages of ES III™, such as full automatic furnace and forehearth control, energy optimization, cost savings and significant reductions in carbon emissions achieved by maximizing the utilization of larger electric boosting systems.
A Technical Plant Manager shared their experience with ES III™, stating, “We have now deployed ES III™ across all nine of our feeders. With over 26 job changes per week, operators previously had to manage numerous zone temperatures, making ES III™ an invaluable asset. In the past, this task would have required a feeder specialist, a role most plants no longer have.
“We have observed several benefits:
- improved system reproducibility
- reduced human interaction, minimized risks of errors
- achievement of temperature targets and stabilization post-job changes
- consistent and uniform temperatures at the feeder end resulting in enhanced gob weight and bottle formation, thereby positively impacting product quality
- energy savings
- reduced risk of reboil and feeder corrosion due to uniform firing
- and increased operator availability for other tasks, such as feeder maintenance”