Biography

Aston is the General Manager of Glass Futures. He is responsible for the day-to-day running of Glass Futures and to ensure that the activities carried out across the Glass Futures programs align with industry trends, technology and direction.  

Aston has worked in the glass industry for over 10 years. He spent 8 years with Ardagh Glass, gaining experience in furnace management, operation, maintenance and capital construction, wider plant engineering and energy management before working with British Glass and GTS on wider cullet recycling research projects, prior to joining Glass Futures.  

With a keen interest in entrepreneurship and innovation, especially in relation to sustainability, Aston has over the past few years developed a passion for driving change in sustainable engineering, manufacturing and in helping open knowledge of the glass industry to a younger generation of engineers. 

Presentation

Glass Futures is a not-for-profit research organisation, built by its members from across the global glass industry with the overarching goal of decarbonisation of the glass-making process and its upstream and downstream activities. Based out of the Glass Futures Centre of Excellence in St Helens, UK: the remit of the organisation is to enable its members from across the glass supply chain and beyond to collaborate in areas which affect all parties. A key shift in focus of the business has been towards digitization of its assets to enable members to run digital experiments that yield real results. 

At the heart of the Glass Futures Centre of Excellence is a 30 tonnes/day pilot-scale glass furnace, capable of producing either flat or formed-glass. The facility has been designed to enable the glass industry to develop and trial new technologies at an industrially relevant scale, without risk to their commercial manufacturing assets. The facility is controlled through a single, central control system that allows complete oversight and control of the facility from one location.  

In this paper, the challenges and triumphs of building a digital furnace and full-plant digital twin will be discussed. The journey of classifying, deploying and developing various artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to allow for greater insights into a fully connected glass plant will be explained. Finally, the steps taken to develop and validate bespoke furnace models that have allowed the physical furnace to be brought into the digital age – allowing experimentation without emissions – will be highlighted.