Which regenerative glass melting furnaces does IWG Glasofenbau supply?

A recuperative end-fired glass furnace is a gas-fired melting furnace with burners at one or both ends. The combustion air is preheated in a recuperator: hot exhaust gases transfer their heat to the incoming air. This reduces gas consumption, ensures stable flame ignition, and increases efficiency.

End-firing creates a clear heat axis from the burner to the refining zone. This supports refining, ensures high homogeneity, and uniform temperatures across the melt surface, breast walls, and crown. Crucial factors are precisely controlled flame length, burner pressure, and draft. Slightly lean operation can reduce NOx emissions; with moderate excess air, reduction effects in the glass remain low.

Where limit values are strict, low-NOx burners, exhaust gas recirculation, or moderate O₂ enrichment are available as equipment options. The result: a robust, energy-efficient furnace solution for small to medium pulling capacities – with reliable product quality, compact design, and attractive investment.

With the recuperative end-fired glass melting furnace from IWG, you can produce, for example, the following types of glass:

The regenerative side-fired glass melting furnace utilizes the laterally arranged burner rows for a very uniform energy input across the entire width of the furnace. The flames, directed perpendicular to the melting direction, create pronounced cross-mixing and ensure stable temperature profiles from the inlet to the refining and working zones.

This allows critical areas such as the melt surface, breast walls, and crown to be operated with very high thermal homogeneity – a crucial factor for high glass purity, low bubble and streak formation, and reliable color settings. The design of burner spacing, flame length, burner pressure, and draft control between the regenerator blocks is precisely tailored to your raw materials, glass type, and pulling capacity.

Thanks to regenerative air preheating, the side-fired furnace operates with very high thermal efficiency and noticeably reduces specific energy consumption. With suitable low-NOx burners, staged combustion, exhaust gas recirculation, or moderate O₂ enrichment, even demanding emission limits can be reliably met – with consistently high melting performance and glass quality. This design particularly demonstrates its advantages in the range of medium to high pulling capacities: uniform temperature distribution across the entire furnace width, stable, low-maintenance operation, high system availability, and an overall compact furnace geometry.

Our regenerative furnaces are fundamentally tailored to your specific application. Geometry, furnace size, pulling capacity, and the division of the inlet, melting, refining, and working areas are variable. The system is adapted to your raw materials, glass type, and desired temperature control via burner arrangement, flame guidance, regenerator size, and materials.

Furthermore, the internal hydraulics can be influenced very precisely: A thermal wall stabilizes the heat balance at the transition to the refining zone, smooths temperature peaks, and supports bubble separation. Electrical throat heating acts deep within the bath, maintains viscosity within the required range, and ensures reproducible temperature profiles right up to the outlet.

In addition, bubbling systems – tailored to your recipe – are used, which can be operated with either compressed air or oxygen. The finely dosed gas promotes convection, accelerates refining, and reduces striae and inclusion defects without altering the glass chemistry. We adjust the proportion of melting and refining through the design of walls and throats: Geometry, position, and flow are chosen so that heat is precisely introduced into the bath and the flow creates the desired circulation. Optionally integrated air or furnace cooling creates additional control reserves at critical points.