Flat glass newsletter. May 2016
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Glass Performance Days – 25 Years Anniversary Conference June 28-30, 2017
Dedicated to Information Sharing
The age of digitalization makes customer relationships personal
The Glass Performance Days started in 1992 triggered by the observation that glass processors had something very important in common: Effective use of state-of-the-art equipment and technology. It was equally evident that this know-how was something that needed and could well be shared. The road from a seminar with limited participation to a truly global, world-leading conference was swift and successful. The dynamo of the concept and long-time Chairman of the Conference Organizing Committee Jorma Vitkala sets the essence and substance of the Conference into perspective:
- The success formula we have followed is crystal clear. We have always believed in the power of information sharing for the development of the industry. In fact we have worked from the hypothesis that information is the only commodity that grows from continuous sharing, he says. When information sharing is conducted in the manner that we call the GPD Spirit it produces results. We have seen that this atmosphere creates benefits for all and the more experience participants possess the better information sharing travels between them. The search for new forms of cooperation and information at the GPD is on-going. In this way participants and speakers have made the Conference into what it is and the organizers are naturally more than grateful in being able to facilitate this high-level exchange.
A note of appreciation
The GPD has worked from a platform of cooperation since the beginning. The participants and sponsors as well as the organizations behind them have contributed remarkably to the common good.
- There have been many spinoffs from the GPD, regional conferences have followed and the formula has been generally accepted and even served as a catalyst for other events, Jorma Vitkala says. Our supporters and contributors deserve genuine appreciation for the input they have contributed and that has made the Glass Performance Days into what the Conference is today – not to mention what it will be tomorrow.
25 Year Anniversary next
Now that the Glass Performance Conference heads towards its 25 Year Anniversary in what will be the 16th Conference June 28-30, 2017 GPD can look back at an impressive record of collecting and sharing glass industry essentials. A total of over 13,000 delegates have attended 3,000 presentations, listened to 1,000 speakers and formed 30,000 contacts over the years.
But a Conference like the GPD is much more than impressive numbers. It is a get-together that brings specialists together for the purpose of learning from an open exchange of information on a personal level. Above all it is something that changes very much over time as experiences and business environments develop. One of the main reasons for going to the GPD is to sense the atmosphere of the times together with colleagues. Business development has a lot to do with intuition and creativity. To stay competitive professionals have to stay in the mainstream of the leading trends. Development is driven by people and that is very personal. The same applies to the career paths of glass professionals. New experts enter the scene, others may leave it but the core remains to pursue continuous development.
- As important as the live Conferences are networking and continuous development is in no way limited to the physical conferences only, Vitkala observes. Web documentation and professional portals are open for facts presentations within the world of glass between conferences as well. The Glassfiles-portal that started up earlier now contains some 8,000 pages of technical articles and offers GPD-speakers an opportunity to communicate with the registered users of the portal.
Bloggers welcome
The latest addition brought on by the digital age is the www.glastory.net portal introduced and spearheaded by Miika Appelqvist of Glaston.
- We have taken on this initiative to serve the entire supply chain of the glass business, from designers to researchers and industry. The mission of the portal is to invite and serve individual bloggers primarily from our GPD sponsor networks representing professional views on the development of the glass business to share information with colleagues on-line and to form acquaintances that go beyond sheer business relationships. The professional respect gained makes on-line contact activity quite personal, Miika Appelqvist remarks.
The next generation
- Twenty-five years could well be labeled one generation in the life of a business, Vitkala ponders. Many things have changed and some essential basics, like the physical properties of the glass material, have remained the same. New technology has been adapted to the inherent physical properties of glass and new products have been developed by utilizing the best the material can offer. A look at today´s city planning and building designs plus the requirements put on energy-efficiency, environmental comfort and stylishness reveals how far we have come from the very first use of glass to cover window openings in buildings, Vitkala reflects. Looking back at the major advances of the latest 25 years of the glass industry one has to mention coating technology, especially LowE and solar applications that have hoisted energy-efficiency to a completely new level. The changes and shapes of modern building design, increased glass sizes, new bonding techniques and the use of glass as a structural element are other notable and significant advances.
Essential GPD features
The special workshops arranged in conjunction with the GPD are tailored for special audiences that have the need for hands-on information on specific issues. At GPD 2015 one of these was the spotlight put on high-rise construction. The lecturers represented leading experts on high-rise and participants were particularly appreciative of the special challenges attached to high-rise – quite different from normal housing or low-rise construction. This workshop proved to be a real eye-opener even for experienced and widely recognized architects. Quote:
- The significance of extensive experience was very evident, special buildings have special demands and the technical requirements of high-rise increase exponentially. The presentations by Keith Boswell and Leon Jacob complimented one another extremely well, from the inside out (building typology and space allocation) and the exterior (curtain walls). The GPD is a super concept, in one-two days one can amass a lot of information, the internet-summaries are excellent, too (Pekka Helin, Pekka Helin & Co. Architects).
Although the GPD is an international forum and English the language participants represent different regions of origin. Some participants hosting business partners at the Conference have arranged simultaneous translation to make sure nothing is lost behind any language barrier. These visitors voiced both appreciation and thankfulness for this special consideration.
The effort of the organizers to screen and streamline presentations added a lot to their clarity and visual appearance. This clearly contributed to the efficiency of communications and also helped keep presentations structurally uniform and within their allocated time frames.
The 16th GPD in its 25th year also coincides with the 100th Anniversary of independent Finland – the home of the main Conference since its beginning. That fact will also contribute to the feeling around the Conference that takes place at the height of the Midsummer season in Scandinavia.
The Aniche float will restart
In mid-September, the float Aniche restart. After an eternity. In April 2012, the furnace went out. After being trained in the new process, workers will produce new glass. But with a small change. Dedicated far the only building market, the site will now produce predominantly for the automobile.
After sixteen years of operation in April 2012, the glass furnace of Saint-Gobain Glass France was dying. But it was better for résuciter. By a company agreement signed in March 2011 by all unions, management pledged to invest 26.6 million for the modernization of the site Aniche. Bodes well for the plant, a thirty-five float glass production units of the Saint-Gobain Group worldwide. Except that the restart was much, much longer than initially announced. Of deferrals, the oven 350 meters long, will have remained more than four years off!
"We were expecting this news with impatience. Staff clung to restart ", recognizes, relieved, Christian Brice, who during all these years has drawn many bells, the Officer of Saint-Gobain France, policies ... What was the daily employees during these four years? Management has posted to some other sites. Of Anichois worked at the Saint-Gobain plant Eurofloat Salaise-sur-Sanne (Isère). It also has been shutdown to be equipped with a new oven. Homecoming of anichois workers who themselves have lost none of their experience (see below). "An oven, it does not call into heated overnight. It takes a month to get the correct glass, "says Christian Brice. The rebuilt furnace has a capacity increased to 670 tons / day against 600 tonnes / day in the former and reduced energy consumption by 15%. And it will not produce as glass for the building. "Its use will be mixed, automobile / construction, with a predominantly auto assignment," says management.
Set foot in the stirrup. For C. Brice is the number 1 concern for those employees who were no longer in contact with an oven. "We must reclaim the manufacturing process, become familiar again with the safety rules ...", means the union. Adding: "Everyone will be holding sleeves. It is not about to slow restart. This restart is excellent news for the labor pool. " In the coming months, staff will undergo a training program. Especially as the management indicated that it plans to hire twenty people. "Before the stop, we were 206. And I am not talking precarious and employees of subcontractors, C. Brice said. Currently we are 180
Dear Spectrum Glass Customers;
We are making an extraordinarily difficult announcement today. After serving the art and specialty glass industry for 40 years, it is with very heavy hearts that we must announce the closure of Spectrum Glass Company. Due to several factors, it is no longer financially feasible for our company to continue to operate.
We will continue manufacturing through June and July 2016, and will sell the product inventory currently on hand over the months ahead.
Please know that our primary concern is to help ease this difficult transition for you and all the people we’ve been proud to work with and serve. We are exploring opportunities to transfer our product lines to other manufacturers to help minimize disruptions in sourcing.
We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all of our partners, customers, artists and others who have supported Spectrum Glass over these past four decades, and who continue to support us now. We will communicate updates here and via other channels as we wind down our operations.
Chartres stained glass exhibition
June 15 to October 15, 2016
Chartres, The Stained Glass Gallery
15 artists are invited by The Stained Glass Gallery
to provide a window on the theme of Chartres
Pierre Carron, Valerie Gaugeac, Tetsuo Harada, Nathalie Lefevre Genevieve de Marcellus, Jean-Luc Parant, Joedane Ribaud Beatrice Roche-Gardies, Isabelle Rosenberg, Alice Sancey, Didier Sancey, Agnieszka Sekita-Lefèvre, Luc Thieulin, Antoine Vincent, Leslie Xuereb.
Coming from different backgrounds, these painters, sculptors, visual artists or writers, living or having Chartres euréliennes ties reflected at the request of Natalie Zins Loire, a work on the theme of Chartres. They then worked with Jacques, Bruno and Hervé Loire, glassmakers in Lèves, to translate their project with the glass material.
The Loire workshop at their disposal their different expertise: colored glass set with enhanced lead or not grisaille glass tiles set with resin, fused glass, thermoformed glasses ... The artists, some of whom had never approached stained glass, chose the technique that best suits their project.
Each with his artistic sensibility, offers his vision of Chartres. The compositions, often figurative, evoke the city through its essential items such as the cathedral, light, scent, but also the Beauce. Others evoke more symbolic or abstract attachment to Chartres.
Explosion of colors or sober colors, variety of styles and expressions, technical prowess, these windows reflect the dynamism of the contemporary art of stained glass.
These works, intended for fans or collectors will take place in homes or public spaces.
It was in 1976 that Micheline Loire opened at the foot of the cathedral of Chartres, The Stained Glass Gallery, which promotes the art of stained glass.
Each was a stained glass exhibition dedicated to young or new talents, a technique or a theme is presented. In 1996, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the gallery, the exhibition "Chartres Stained Glass" presented stained glass made by master glassmakers and artists on the theme of Chartres.
In this 2016 year for the 40 years of the Gallery, Natalie Zins Loire chose to extend the event by calling on 15 euréliens artists.
FROG: A new system for glass inspection
When industrial innovation deals with glass crashing and quality control
Have you ever thought about how the glasses of your car would break in case of a strong collision? In many pieces of course, but how many? And how big? Indeed, the number and size of the glass fragments are very important as far as security is concerned.
We are talking about tempered glass, the glass undergoing a specific tempering process including heating and subsequent cooling. Such process renders the glass about four times stronger than "ordinary", or annealed glass. Unlike ordinary glass, which can shatter into jagged shards when broken, tempered glass breaks into small, relatively harmless pieces. This is why tempered glass is used in those environments where human safety is an issue. Applications include side and rear windows in vehicles, entrance doors, shower and tub enclosures, microwave ovens and skylights.
To check the size and the number of fragments in a given glass product in order for such product to meet quality control and security criteria: this is the need of specific glass manufacturing processes. And here’s the invention from Deltamax Automazione, a company from Trento with over twenty years experience in industrial automation and machine vision, and whose mission is to guide its customers in using innovative technologies in order to improve effectiveness and efficiency in production processes.
FROG (Fragment Recognizer On Glass), this is the name of the new system, is a rational and user friendly interface for automatic visual inspection of glass products.
But how does it work? Chiara Corridori, Deltamax Technical Manager explains: “FROG can automatically recognize, count, analyze and classify glass fragments following a glass product break. In addition, it can store the images and the results processed to generate customized reports”. She continues: “The main component of the FROG system is the inspection unit, connected to a PC and to the electrical cabinet: the user can move the system to the desired position and select the analysis functionality in the graphic user interface. At the end of the analysis, the system releases a report on the test results, including the image of the glass as acquired by the camera, the number of fragments identified and the size of the biggest fragments”.
“The advantages of an automatic system for counting fragments compared to a manual counting system”, continues Chiara Corridori, “are obvious: quicker and objective results, in accordance with identified standards, and possibility of data storing. Thanks to the use of direct light, FROG is extremely easy to manoeuvre and suitable to be used also with printed glass: two features that make it stand out from competitors using backlight illumination. In addition to the new use, the market appreciates the solution because of the convenient price and because it needs no installation”.
FROG stems from Risolvi, acronym of “RIcerca di SOLuzioni di Visione per applicazioni Industriali” (research of vision solutions for industrial applications), a research project funded by the Trento Province between 2011 and 2015, which has allowed to implement prototypes able to innovate GlassInspector, the system created by Deltamax using camera technology to recognize and catalogue defects, and to inspect glass sheets directly on the production line. The research project has been carried out in collaboration with the TeV group from the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Fbk) research centre in Trento. The collaboration has been very successful as it involved the transfer of know-how on Image Processing algorithms as well as software System architecture. As a consequence, a scientist from Fbk is now employed by Deltamax.
Furthermore, together with Fbk, a new software architecture has been designed and implemented (DVS – Deltamax Vision System), which provides new applications with flexibility, expandability and ease in configuration.
This allows computer scientists to reduce developing time and the system installers to modify the parameters in order to adjust the system to a new need without modifying the code.
The artificial vision system, i.e. the use of cameras and optical sensors for the acquisition of images and for the automatic search of defects, derives from the so-called Machine Vision, a branch of Systems Engineering requiring different competences and relying on mechanical-optical-electronic-software systems integrated solution for examining natural objects and materials, human and industrial artifacts and manufacturing processes, in order to detect defects and improve quality, thus increasing efficiency and safety of both products and processes.
Recently, Deltamax invented an innovative solution for improving systems for defects identification and classification. For such systems, both the hardware (illuminator and electronic control cards) and algorithms have been developed. For example, starting from an algorithm conceived by researchers at the University of Munich for highlighting streets in satellite images, Deltamax has implemented a new algorithm able to identify scratches in flat glass surfaces images as if they were streets. Scratches and streets in fact share the same geometric characteristics: length, thinness, and curvilinearity.
Gianluca Diener, manager of Deltamax Inspection Technology area, concludes: “The impact our research has generated is tangible: over the last four years in the artificial vision area the 3 initial people that work on software development have now become 7, of whom one is the researcher collaborating to the Risolvi project. Moreover, the feedback from the market is positive and we already face an increase in our sales”.
Change in the distribution of machinery for flat glass in France.
A change in the shareholding of Pacard distributor has had consequences for some redistribution of commercial cards.
The arrival of Eric Laurenty in Pacard facilitated the entry of CMS in Pacard instead Intermac. CMS had no real distribution structure for its business machines for glass since the departure of Patrick Guévard and was able in this way to rebuild a place on the French market.
