£75m Glass Futures facility in Liverpool city region installs AI-driven ‘digital twin’ of its glass furnace enabling the testing of new ways to make glass. Tony McDonough reports
Glassmakers will be able to use a new AI-driven facility in Liverpool city region to test new ways of making glass.
Glass Futures (GF), a £75m facility in St Helens, has installed an AI-driven ‘digital twin’ of its glass furnace capable of testing and predicting new and the best ways to make glass. This is a digital and immersive model of its first-in-the-world multi-fuel pilot furnace.
Combining data from the real furnace and simulated information with the laws of physics, the digital twin can process more than 11,000 calculations at once accurately predicting glass output.
It means industry will be able to test changes in temperature, pressure, density and other measures on the digital furnace revealing accurate predictions of how this would work in a real furnace.
Opened in June 2023, Glass Futures is tasked with seeking new decarbonised ways of making glass in St Helens that has been a global centre for glassmaking for two centuries. It has seen the creation of around 80 jobs.
The AI-GLASS project has been running for the last year with NVIDIA, a leader in artificial intelligence and The University of Liverpool’s Virtual Engineering Centre, which has created a fully immersive model viewed through VR headsets.
Dr Jim Scotson, project lead for industrial digitalisation at Glass Futures, said: “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. The AI is incredibly powerful.
“Rather than just learning from our real and simulated data it already has a physics informed neural network so when we put data in, it digests this with physics principles meaning it’s incredibly accurate and can calculate 11,530 calculations all at once.”
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By creating an exact replica of a real furnace, it means industry can be more experimental, testing new ways to decarbonise, improve efficiencies and confidently adopt new low-carbon alternatives such as hydrogen and biofuels.
Anthony Hills, director of UKI at NVIDIA, added: “AI-GLASS shows how advanced AI can unlock entirely new ways of understanding and improving complex industrial processes.”