Thai Malaya Glass successfully commissioned the SB4 furnace in Saraburi on time. The plant construction was on schedule, with commissioning and production starting smoothly. SB4 is a state of the art furnace in all areas, with exemplary efficiency and energy consumption.
Sorg Group’s subsidiary Nikolaus Sorg GmbH & Co.KG delivered the furnace as well as the forehearths. EME GmbH delivered the batch house and the fully automatic cullet return.
SB4 is a gas-fired end-port furnace with a Sorg® Deep Refiner® and melting booster. It is designed for a capacity of 300 tpd (tons per day) flint and amber glass for containers. The possibility of a performance increase up to 350 tpd is foreseen.
Batch charging is accomplished with the newest EME-NEND®-S3 charger via IRD doghouse. Furthermore, the plant is equipped with a Sorg STW distributor and five Sorg® 340S® forehearths. The batch house delivered by EME is a tower system, designed for the highest flexibility in production of various glass colours (various formulas) for two furnaces and with a total capacity of 700 tpd. It feeds not only the SB4 but the future SB5 furnace as well, which is going to be commissioned in mid-2018.
Besides conventional metal detectors, a fully automatic all-metal-elimination by means of an eddy current system is integrated into the cullet charging. Thus it is possible to improve the quality of the charged cullet and consequentially increase the furnace lifetimes.
Additionally, the plant is provided with two mixers, each with a capacity of 1875 liters, as well as a fully automatic pre-mix system.
Besides the batch plant, EME also delivered fully automatic cullet return systems for both SB4 and SB5.
The furnace and batch house are both controlled by a high availability Siemens S7-400.
Using a joint SCADA system it is possible to operate the complete process from every computer – from raw material delivery, batch production and melting to glass conditioning and factory cullet return. By using web servers, the customer can use any computer as independent clients – even mobile devices are possible. A firewall offers a VPN access for remote service purposes and provides a data interface to high-level customer systems.
