AI-driven digital twin innovates glass manufacturing
Research and technology organisation Glass Futures, UK, has implemented an immersive model of its ‘world-first’ multi-fuel pilot furnace.
The UK-based artificial intelligence (AI)-GLASS project enables manufacturers to experiment making glass in a digital replica of a real furnace, presenting new ways to decarbonise, improve efficiencies and adopt low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen and biofuels.
The immersive modelling can process more than 11,000 calculations at once to predict how best to manufacture the material in real-world conditions.
Part of a £1.5mln Innovate UK funding programme, AI-GLASS pools the expertise of Glass Futures with NVIDIA’s physics-informed modelling tools. University of Liverpool’s Virtual Engineering Centre has created the fully immersive model that can be viewed through virtual reality headsets.
Dr Jim Scotson, Project Lead for Industrial Digitalisation at Glass Futures, explains how ‘the digital twin enables us to test things industry has never tried out before’.
‘It means we can drive innovation by allowing manufacturers of glass and other materials to try new fuels, electric heating, bubbling and other techniques and get an accurate prediction of how the end product will turn out.’
