Development of a Numerical Optimization Method for Blowing Glass Parison Shapes

Abstract

industrial glass blowing is an essential stage of manufacturing glass containers, i.e., bottles or Jars. An initial glass preform is brought into a mold and subsequently blown into the mold shape. Over the past few decades, a wide range of numerical models for forward glass blow process simulation has been developed, A considerable challenge is the inverse problem: to determine an optimal preform from the desired container shape, A simulation model for blowing glass containers based on finite element methods has previously been developed model uses level set methods to track the glass-air interfaces. The model described in a previous paper of the authors showed how to perform the forward computation of a final bottle from the given initial preform without using optimization. This paper introduces a method to optimize the shape of the preform combined with the existing simulation model. In particular, the new optimization method presented aims at minimizing the error in the level set representing the glass-air interfaces of the desired container. The number of parameters used for the optimization is restricted to a number of control points for describing the interfaces of the preform by parametric curves, from which the preform level set function can be reconstructed. Numerical applications used for the preform optimization method presented are the blowing of an axisymmetrical ellipsoidal container and an axisymmetrical Jar.

Numerical Optimization of the Parison Thickness of Oil Drum in Extrusion Blow Molding

“…Extrusion blow molding (EBM) is the process for the production of high density polyethylene (HDPE) containers, in particular for the oil drum. Groot et al [2] reduce design errors of blow molds by using a numerical method and computer aided manufacturing techniques to save development cycle and reduce costs. Li et al [3] simulated 3-D slit flows in extrusion sheet dies.…”