Biography
Based out of Germany, Matthias Goerisch has been working 27 years+ at Linde GmbH. As Technology Commercialization Manager at Linde Technology, he is helping glass producers in Europe & Middle East become efficient and reduce carbon footprint by providing and implementing state of the art gas-based technologies.
Matthias began his Linde career in the late 90’s as a local Application Sales Engineer in the Metallurgy segment in Germany. He was involved in multiple R&D Programs, Market Analysis campaigns and development of new business models.
Subsequently, Matthias took on the role of Market Development Manager Metallurgy in Germany, where he worked closely with the German/European glass industry for more than 15 years. During this period, he successfully supported projects including Oxyfuel Technologies, Combustion Technologies, O2-VPSA-Plants, innovative Hydrogen supply solutions and Specialty Gases for Coating Technologies.
Matthias education: Graduate Engineer in Material Science (Focus on Metals, Glass & Ceramics and Semiconductor Devices), Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Presentation
While there is significant focus on decarbonization and AI-related advances in glass manufacturing, the container glass industry is dealing with the near-term challenge of declining market demand coupled with the political uncertainties in the Europe and Middle East. Typically, air-fuel container glass furnaces are designed for a furnace campaign of 10 – 15 years. Rebuilding such a furnace entails significant capital investment. Further performance of a furnace may typically deteriorate as it ages. Under such circumstances, the ability to extend the furnace campaign by several months to a few years or increase throughput to design conditions could have a favorable short-term impact on the profitability of the furnace operation.
Linde provides a range of oxygen-based solutions for such air-fuel furnaces. This presentation will provide an insight and present three distinct solutions implemented on container glass furnaces in Asia-Pacific and Europe in the last 5 years.
The first case was a cross-fired furnace with severely collapsed checker packs resulting in a pull rate reduction of 11% versus design. Linde implemented a unique Target Wall Lancing solution that improved combustion efficiency in the melter and rebalanced heat distribution to increase pull rate back to the original design value.
In the second case, a pair of oxyfuel burners were installed at the hot-spot area of an aging end-port furnace to increase pull rate by 14% versus design to meet market demand.
The third case involved deploying a combination of solutions – hot spot boosting and under-port O2 lancing to achieve a pull rate increase of close to 25% versus existing values.
In summary: these recently completed industrial projects demonstrate that these technologies can be used on all-natural gas/air-heated glass melting tanks (where they have been in use for over 20 years).