Biography
Bruno Malphettes is Business Development Director at Fives, in charge of bringing innovative hot end solutions to glassmakers across multiple segments and geographies. He has been with Fives since 2018, when he joined as a glass furnace expert to participate in the development, design and implementation of innovative glass melting projects.
He obtained his degree in Materials Science and Engineering at the Ecole des Mines in France, where he discovered a passion for glass.
Prior to Fives, Bruno started his career as Melting Operations Manager for the Saint-Gobain – Corning joint-venture Eurokera. From this point, he assumed several technical and commercial roles in the Saint-Gobain group over 15 years, in the fields of solar glass, furnace refractory, glass furnace design and glass melting problems troubleshooting.
Presentation
After several years investigating multiple paths towards decarbonation, the opinion of glass technologists, investors and customers across the industry seem to converge on two conclusions, fueled by pragmatism, geopolitics and research: there is a growing desire to get rid of fossil fuels in glass melting and conditioning, and direct electrification is most obvious and the least painful path to decarbonization.
Questions however remain wide open: what is the precise pathway, what are the practical steps to take to electrify and when to implement them? Our certainty is that optimal answers exist for each plant, each rebuild and each investment, whatever the pressure of CAPEX, OPEX or schedule; the challenge is to remain flexible, with the right mix of creativity and rigor.
This paper will explore four different ways that have effectively been followed to combine significant electrification with efficiency and realistic business case. These different ways are not meant to be generalized but to illustrate the diversity of solutions as well as the key importance of innovating designs, serious modeling and forward-thinking implementation.
In the first two examples, we will describe two projects of partial electrification of a regenerative furnace in a highly constrained capex pressure – one of them for a Sisecam furnace. We will explain in both cases how we found the good compromise between ideal design and cost of implementation, and the actual results obtained.
In the next two examples, we will show how radical changes such as regenerative to recuperative and oxygas to all-electric have been found as the lowest total cost of ownership in specific contexts.
Across all four examples, we will also insist on the side benefits of technological upgrades that still can be factored to facilitate positive and de-risked decisions that make the industry evolve gradually in a radical and no-return direction.