As a leading European food packaging enterprise, EuroPack has long supplied food-grade soda-lime glass bottles to over 200 supermarkets in the EU. However, its decade-old traditional flame furnace gradually became a "stumbling block" for business expansion—it consumed up to 800kWh of energy per ton of glass melting, far exceeding the limit set by EU environmental regulations. Worse still, trace impurities from fuel combustion kept the glass bottle qualification rate at around 88%. In early 2023, one of its core clients, a German supermarket chain, put forward a new requirement of "impurity rate below 0.5%". Failure to meet this would result in a 30% reduction in annual orders, prompting EuroPack to urgently launch the soda-lime glass electric furnace construction project.
Upon receiving the request, our team arrived at EuroPack's production base in Poland within 3 days, crossing 4 time zones. On-site testing revealed that the traditional furnace had a temperature difference of ±25℃ in the melting pool due to uneven flame distribution. However, soda-lime glass (mainly composed of SiO₂, Na₂O, and CaO) has strict requirements for temperature stability during melting, needing a continuous and uniform temperature zone of 1450-1500℃. Temperature fluctuations easily cause devitrification in the glass melt, leading to impurities. Based on this, we tailor-designed a "three-zone submerged electrode heating + fully automatic intelligent batching system" solution: the melting pool was divided into three independent temperature zones (melting, fining, and homogenizing), each controlled by 8 sets of molybdenum electrodes for precise temperature regulation; meanwhile, the batching system equipped with a laser particle size analyzer could adjust the raw material ratio in real time with an error of ±0.1%, reducing impurities from the source. For furnace lining, magnesia-alumina spinel bricks—3 times more corrosion-resistant than ordinary refractory bricks—were used, extending the service life to over 5 years.
During the project advancement, EuroPack put forward two rigid requirements: the reserved workshop space was only 8 meters wide and 15 meters long, which could not accommodate conventional furnaces; and the furnace needed to be completed and put into production within 3 months to avoid affecting peak-season supply. We immediately carried out modular split design for the furnace, disassembling core components such as the melting pool, electrode system, and temperature control cabinet into 12 prefabricated modules. 90% of the assembly and commissioning were completed in domestic factories, requiring only on-site splicing and installation; at the same time, the "parallel construction method" was adopted, with foundation pouring and module prefabrication carried out simultaneously, shortening the original 120-day construction period to 85 days. During construction, 5 engineers stayed on-site throughout, collaborating with the local construction team to solve more than 10 on-site issues such as equipment hoisting and circuit connection, ensuring every step complied with EU industrial safety standards.
On the day of furnace commissioning, the temperature monitoring system showed that the temperature difference in each zone was stable at ±3℃. The first batch of soda-lime glass bottles produced passed the test, with light transmittance increased from the original 82% to 94% and impurity rate reduced to 0.3%, fully meeting the customer's requirements. The data after commissioning was even more impressive: the energy consumption per ton of glass melting dropped to 480kWh, a 40% reduction compared with the traditional furnace, saving more than 1.2 million euros in electricity costs annually; it stably produced 20,000 qualified glass bottles per day, increasing production capacity by 25%. Thanks to the excellent results, half a year after commissioning, EuroPack not only retained its original orders but also added two new supermarket clients from France and Italy. It proactively placed an order for 2 more soda-lime glass electric furnaces of the same model, establishing a long-term strategic cooperative relationship with us.