Glass Futures (GF) has installed a unique AI-driven ‘digital twin’ of its glass furnace capable of testing and predicting new and the best ways to make glass.
Located at its global centre of excellence in St Helens, UK, Glass Futures has implemented 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 over 11 thousand 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.
The AI-GLASS project has been running for the last year with NVIDIA, a world 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. Thanks to “NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 GPUs, we can combine real pilot-line data with 16 sensor points and NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo, meaning it is informed by the laws of physics.
“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 principals meaning it’s incredibly accurate and can calculate 11,530 calculations all at once. This allows us to remove the barriers to experimentation by making things possible, more quickly.”
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.
Glass Futures will now work with its members and cross-industry partners in steel, ceramics and other sectors on projects using the digital twin and then the real pilot line and also use their expertise to support other teams to digitalise.
AI-GLASS is part of a wider GBP 1.5 million Innovate UK funding programme being delivered through Make UK.