This work was completed to demonstrate the feasibility of agglomerating and preheating glass batch to achieve lower energy consumption in the glass melting process, and to reduce pollutant generation in both the glass tank and through capture mechanisms by passing waste furnace gases through a packed bed of agglomerates. This project has been funded, at least in part, with federal funds from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Contract 68-02-2460. Agglomeration is the consolidation of particles into a compact mass and may include pelletizing, briquetting, pelleting, roll compaction or other similar consolidation processes. Preheating is somewhat of a misnomer, but in this case means the prereaction of glass batch by some method of heating before it is charged into a glass melting furnace. The areas of study covered during the first phase of this project included (1) a literature review to study previous work done in several subject areas; (2) selection of raw materials and glass compositions to be used during the bench scale and pilot plant studies; (3) pelletizing parameters which were important to an overall process; (4) drying of wet pellets if determined to be necessary, (5) preheating studies of the glass batch pellets; (6) pollutant capture mechanisms in packed beds of pellets; and (7) the melting behavior of pellets and loose batch.
