Dynamic Modeling Simulation of Regenerator for Glass Furnace Applications

The melting process in the glass industry is an energy-intensive process that uses fossil fuels to maintain melting temperatures between 1600°C and 1700°C. The process is carried out in the Glass Furnace. Obtained the high temperature also of flue gas is around 1350 °C – 1500 °C. Hence with the high temperature is potential to heat recovery in the form of combustion air pre-heating using a regenerator to increase the efficiency in Glass Furnace. This phenomenon gave rise to an idea to create a modelling mathematic to know the optimum process in Glass Furnace. Many studies on Glass furnace regenerator have been carried out but only for one cyclic of heat transfer in regenerator. Therefore, in this study, dynamic modeling of the regenerator will be made, namely a mathematical model that describes quantitatively the dynamic behavior during the process of reversing the direction between the regenerators, which will later explain the effect of air flow rate and the selection of the optimal transition time value for the demonstration, regenerator work and regenerator heat stability, by observing the dynamic behavior of the regenerator temperature profile using the FlexPDE software version 7. The simulation results show that the longer the switching time of regenerator is linier to inclining temperature in the regenerator with the optimum switching time (ST) at 10 minutes. The regenerator heat stability greatly influenced by air flow rate and heat propagation by heat transfer convection. However, the dimension selection of the regenerator plays a crucial role in heat utilization in glass furnaces.