A Senior Design Project in Environmentally Friendly Glass Manufacturing

This paper discusses an educational effort that incorporates environmentally conscious design for glass manufacturing in a senior design project at Drexel University. A critical component of a national “green industries/green jobs” effort is to motivate our citizenry to become proficient in STEM and associated manufacturing fields and trades, thus ensuring we have a 21-century workforce. This senior design project engages students in the implementation of an innovative method for improving tool design and measuring the quality of glass using statistical process control and thermal image processing. Through this project, students learn how to provide a green design method for evaluating the characteristics of environmentally friendly glass manufacturing. This student senior design project was in collaboration with Bent Glass Design Inc., which is a specialty glass company focusing on the production of custom design glass for applications in transportation and architectural applications. There has been an increasing demand for delivering its custom products with a polished edge in recent years. The students incorporated real-world experience with innovative green design for the reduction of manual operations and use of hazardous materials, as well as improving final product quality. For the sake of comparisons for green design, experiments were conducted, including surface roughness tests, thermal image analysis, and effects of water cooling. A concluding section discusses the experiences from this project.