SAFETY GLASS TECHNOLOGY CHANGES
ROLLER HEART FURNACE
- ”Roller heart glass” furnaces were invented by Mr. Harold McMaster of GLASSTECH Inc. His inventions dominated also flat tempering and bending and tempering furnace until 1980’ies. They were very expensive. I was told that GLASSTECH Inc. collected royalties for every square meter of tempered glass.
FLAT GLASS TEMPERING
In 1990’ies Tamglass Engineering were developing windscreen bending furnaces. And finally ruled flat glass tempering with HTF furnaces, invented also by Pauli Reunamäki 1980’ies. Western competitors were GLASSTECH, Cattin, EFCO, Techoglass, Erdmann, MAPPI and KERAGLASS.
LOW EMISSIVE GLASSES CAME TO MARKED IN 1990’ies.
This created need for convection furnaces. Many western companies tried. Everyone failed. IANUA succeed at the first try! Ex-Tamglass engineer copied HTF radiation heated furnace and added convection to it. It was intended to be convection + radiation process. It was christened CONVAIR. CONV for convection, A for and, IR for irradiation. But it did include radiation. Read this webpage / Flat Tempering.
THIS WAS DIFFICULT
- Tamglass/GLASTON competed with ”ProConvection”, compressed air convection, with CONVAIR .
- Cattin quickly sold 5 convection heating furnaces. Tamglass bought Cattin immediately. Cattin furnaces fiascos. They were replaced by HTF furnaces.
- GLASSROBOTS ”RoboTemp” made in 2003. It was basically a copy of CONVAIR. Tamglass or GLASTON turbo charged convection named ”SONIC”. SONIC process was bad.
- Chinese started in 1990’ies, too. Typical to Chinese it was ”RADIATION TYPE HEATING PROCESS” because it is cheapest. The process is bad and low capacity.
- Land Glass Technology Co. Ltd and FERACITAS, (Risto Nikander) had license negotiations in 2002 – 2003 for cheaper ”CONVAIR”. Later it obtained US7290405B2 and Chinese patent ZL 02 8 16208.0. Land Glass violated FERACITAS patents. Land Glass knew of EFCO and Cattin short heaters and MATRIX heating for radiation. Land Glass made it better and cheaper, JetConvection, CYCLONE and most likely UltraJet! Land Glass dominated convection heating until 2010.
- GLASTON FC-Series since 2010. It had proper matrix heating for convection air. FC-series is otherwise a copy of CONVAIR and RoboTemp. Marketing and sales were a great success. The air circulation illustration below. It would have been a fiasco if made in this way.
GLASTON tries to keep “high-tech technology” image by articles like https://www.glassonweb.com/article/thermal-radiation-and-forced- convection-flat-glass-tempering-furnaces. This article has been removed. - The article like https://glaston.net/releases/?id=BF9AE34FEE811B86 look like green washing from a company.
RADIATION TYPE FURNACES
Energy efficiency and capacity are very bad for low emissivity glasses. Accuracy of heating control is very bad because it is far from glass surface. It should be hot air matrix for low emissive glasses. Radiation type furnaces break glass in the furnace and in tempering section. See articles my articles of heating control. 
- South Technology Co., Ltd is one more big manufacturer in China. They replaced compressed air convection by a “turbo” to reduce energy consumption. However, South Glass turbo is weak convection compared to GLASTON SONIC. This is why it works like ”RADIATION TYPE FURNACES”. Other Chinese manufactures follow quickly.
- Radiation furnaces, like GLASTON RC-furnaces and MAPPI good, but profitability is low and very bad for low emissive glasses.