Walking the line between glass leak prevention and longer furnace life can be tough. How far can you push your furnace walls before applying an overcoat? For many glass manufacturers, concerns about risk lead to over-cautious maintenance policies that accelerate erosion. Until now, this couldn't be helped. When you have to guess about the condition of refractory walls, the only way to mitigate risk is to schedule an overcoat early.  

We have changed the rules when it comes to scheduled furnace maintenance. Using SmartMelter solution, you can perform condition-based maintenance with confidence because you know the actual condition of every wall.  Glass Worldwide Magazines's recent interview with Terry Hartman explains how this benefited Libbey Glass:

Libbey has leveraged this technology to help better plan its overall business from end to end. Recently, for example, for one of the glassmaker's furnaces at its Shreveport plant, SmartMelter indicated better than expected wall thickness, which resulted in delaying the overcoat for a year and also extending the planned rebuild by 12 months.

How long could you extend furnace life if you measured the wall thickness with an accuracy of a few millimeters?  We recently performed a blind trial of the Refractory Thickness Sensor (RTS) on a Float Furnace in Europe for a leading global manufacturer. Our team took measurements of the furnace wall thickness about one week before the hot repair.  When the glass level was lowered and the AZS blocks were recovered, the manufacturer measured actual residual thickness.  Most of the blocks measured 0-2 mm from the SmartMelter measurements. The largest variance between the block and the SmartMelter data was 5 mm.