We are going to see Stepwise Glass bottle manufacturing process in this article. We use glass bottles in everyday life. Glass is a ceramic material.
Glass bottles are manufactured by melting sand and blowing the molten viscous material into required shape using a mould and then cooled.
The process may looks simple, but multiple technologies are used to get a defect-free glass bottle in the glass bottle manufacturing factories. Diving into this article to understand the details of the techniques and principles used in the manufacturing process.
The glass bottle manufacturing process has ten steps in the process from the beginning to the end. We now look into each step in details.
Steps in Glass Bottle Manufacturing Process
1. Raw Materials Preparation:
- The primary raw materials are used in manufacturing glass bottles are Sand, Soda ash, Limestone And Cullet.
- Sand is the body former which gives the strength to the glass once it is made. Usually, the percentage of silica or sand varies based on the type or usage of the glass bottle. The percentage of the Silica is 70% plus or minus 10%. The melting point of the glass is inversely propositional to the silica content present in the composition. Initially, silica is crushed and grounded to fine particle size and then stored in storage hopper. The size of the quartz is reduced up to 50#.
- Soda ash is used as a fluxing agent. Which helps to lower the melting point of the silica present in the glass.
- Cullet means the recycled glass. One of the best property of the glass is it can be recycled. 10% to 20% cullet is added in the composition based on the property required for the glass. Culets may be a defect piece from the production process or maybe a recycle from the real world market. Both ways the Glass is recycled to avoid any damage to the environment. Cullets are initially stored and then broken into smaller size materials using the crushers. From the hopper, size reduced recycled glass material is carried to another storage hopper using belt conveyor. Manually foreign elements will be removed, and magnets are used to remove the iron in this conveyers.
- Colour glass will be produced by adding an oxide to the compositions.
