Demonstration of oxygen-enriched air staging at Owens-Brockway Glass Containers. Technical progress report, August 1, 1995--July 31, 1996

The objective of the program is to demonstrate the use of a previously developed combustion modification technology to reduce NO, emissions from sideport regenerative container glass melters. This technology, known as oxygen-enriched air staging (OEAS), has been demonstrated, and is now being commercialized, for endport container glass furnaces. A 17-month development program has been established with specific objectives to: (1) acquire baseline operating data on the host sideport furnace in Vernon, California, (2) evaluate secondary oxidant injection strategies based on earlier endport furnace results and through modeling of a single port pair, (3) retrofit and test one port pair (the test furnace has six port pairs) with a flexible OEAS system, and select the optimal system configuration, (4) use the results from tests with one port pair to design, retrofit, and test OEAS on the entire furnace (six port pairs), and (5) analyze test results, prepare report, and finalize the business plan to commercialize OEAS for sideport furnaces. The host furnace for testing in this program is an Owens-Brockway 6-port pair sideport furnace in Vernon, California producing 325-ton/d of amber container glass. The baseline NO{sub x} level of this optimized furnace is about 4.0 lb/ton of glass. An anticipated NO{sub x}, reduction of 50% will lower the NO{sub x} production level to below 2 lb/ton. Secondary oxidant staging techniques being considered include oxygen-enriched ambient air staging (OEAS) and oxygen staging (OS)