Carbon reduction with super boosting and advanced energy management using renewable resources

The share and use of Electric melting is today steadily growing again. This is not new, as some decennia's ago it already was quite popular. The first furnace that used electric current was built in 1905 following Sauvageon's design was melting glass for window glass production. Since that time many different designs were tried. In more recent decennia's electric melting became less popular due to low price and wide availability of fossil fuels. Just in recent years with the fear of Global Warming and plans for CO2 reduction, the interest in full or partial (Hybrid) electric melting is getting more attention again. The generation of electricity by alternative energy sources is of course a great help here as it brings costs of Electricity finally down and will be CO2 free. In Europe the average generation of electricity by renewable resources is already in range of 38% coming from wind, solar, hydro and bio. The question for the future is not if we will have more electric energy usage for glass melting, but if the future will be Vertical All Electric Melting (VAEM) also known as Cold Top, or Horizontal Hybrid Electric melting (H3EM) also known as Hot Top. H3EM allows to use the optimal balance using more Hydrogen or Bio fuels and some amount of fossil fuels and a large amount of electric melting step by step to reduce our CO2 footprint. The paper will show some examples of the past & present, and some ideas for the future strongly supported with mathematical modeling of new furnace designs and the use of advanced model-based furnace control to find the optimum cost-effective heat source at any given time. © 2021 The American Ceramic Society.