In glass container manufacturing (e.g. production of glass bottles and jars) an important process step is the blowing of the final product. This process is fast and is characterized by large deformations and the interaction of a hot glass fluid that gets into contact with a colder metal, the mould. The objective of this paper is to extend and further develop our finite element model [1] to be used for industrial purposes. To achieve this both steps of the forming of glass containers, namely blowblow needs to be simulated and tested against real industrial problems. The model should be able to correctly represent the flow of glass, the energy exchange during the process and provide the final thickness of the final product. For tracking the geometry of the deforming inner and outer interface of glass, the level set technique is applied on a fixed mesh. At each time step the coupled problem of flow and energy exchange is solved by the model. Here the flow problem is only solved for the domain enclosed by the mould, whereas in the energy calculations, the mould domain is also taken into account. A non uniform temperature distribution is considered for the blowing of the preform. For all the calculations the material parameters (like viscosity) are based on the glass position, i.e. the position of the level sets. The velocity distribution, as found from this solution procedure, is then used to update the two level sets by means of solving a convection equation. A fast marching re-initialization algorithm is applied after each time step in order to let the level sets re-attain the property of being a signed distance function. The model is validated by several examples focusing on both the overall behavior (such as conservation of mass and energy) and the local behavior of the flow (such as glass-mould contact) and temperature distributions.
The blow-blow forming process is a widely used technique in glass container manufacturing (e.g., production of glass bottles and jars). This process typically takes few seconds and is characterized by large deformations and temperature gradients. In the work of Giannopapa (2008, “Development of a Computer Simulation Model for Blowing Glass Containers,” ASME J. Manuf. Sci. Eng., 130, p. 041003), the development of a computer simulation model for glass blowing was presented and demonstrated on dummy problems with an initially uniform glass temperature. The objective of this paper is to extend and further develop the simulation model to be used for industrial purposes. To achieve this, both steps of the blow-blow forming process of glass containers are simulated and tested against real industrial problems. In this paper, a nonuniform temperature distribution is considered for the blowing of the preform, which is reconstructed from temperature data provided by the industry. The model is validated by means of several examples regarding conservation properties, behavior of the flow, and comparison of the glass thickness with experimental measurements. Furthermore, by means of these examples, the sensitivity of the glass thickness to inaccuracies in the measurement and reconstruction of the initial temperature distribution is verified.
An application of the level-set method in a finite element library for the simulation of the glass forming process is described. The forming process of containers (i.e bottles, jars) results in a thermomechanical problem with an evolving glass air interface posing a great challenge in modeling. The finite element method is used in our computations to accurately simulate the glass flow, the process' energy exchange with the heavily temperature dependent viscosity of the glass. Our model uses the level set method to track the glass-air interface. In this way remeshing can be avoided and computational costs can be significantly reduced. The glass-air interface can be seen as two interfaces: inner glass air interface and an outer glass-air interface. Thus, we solve two level set equations which allow us to apply the correct material parameters to the aforementioned equations without explicitly having to trace the glass surfaces. Numerical examples are provided tracking the glass-air interface of the blowing of a preform with non-uniform temperature.
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