Over five years ago, the Department of Energy's Office of Industrial Technology funded a program to develop a user-friendly coupled glass furnace simulation. The people involved with the code development were not experienced glass furnace modelers. This allowed for a different perspective on modeling glass furnaces. During the course of the project, many furnaces were modelled, several new models were developed, and many interactions took place between the modelers and members of the glass industry. From these interactions, several practical engineering "conclusions" were discovered concerning glass furnace physics and operations. This paper will discuss these practical aspects from an engineering point of view with very little emphasis on computational techniques or numerical models.
