Mathematical modelling and computational reduction of molten glass fluid flow in a furnace melting basin

Abstract

In this work, we present the modelling and numerical simulation of a molten glass fluid flow in a furnace melting basin. We first derive a model for a molten glass fluid flow and present numerical simulations based on the finite element method (FEM). We further discuss and validate the results obtained from the simulations by comparing them with experimental results. Finally, we also present a non-intrusive proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) based on artificial neural networks (ANN) to efficiently handle scenarios which require multiple simulations of the fluid flow upon changing parameters of relevant industrial interest. This approach lets us obtain solutions of a complex 3D model, with good accuracy with respect to the FEM solution, yet with negligible associated computational times.