Right now we are going to the large factory making bottles in Novosibirsk, Russia.
The factory started its work in 1954 as a maker of optoelectronic devices, cathode-ray tubes for oscillography and television picture tubes. In 1994 the mass production of TV equipment was over in Russia and the factory was repurposed to make glass jars.
Today the factory “Ekran” has a leading position among manufacturers of glass jars on the territory from the Urals to the Russian Far East.
They make bottles for alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, cans for juice, sauce and other products with capacity from 0,25 litres to 3 litres; bottles from brown glass.
This is a glass furnace.
The output of the factory is 620 million glass jars a year. It’s about 1,7 million items a day.
The output of the glass furnace is about 180 tons of glass mass a day.
The technology consists of the following major processes:
- preparation of raw materials;
- preparation of furnace charge (dry mixture of materials put into a furnace for making glass mass),
- glass mass boiling,
- fritting and formation of products;
- quality control and packing.
Glass mass is just taken from the furnace.
The furnace charge is heated to 1100-1600 C for making glass mass.
Color of glass depends on additives.
The process of making glass mass is rather smelly, by the way.
Then the glass mass is cooled down to become viscous. Those streams below are future bottles.
This is a process of making glass drops.
The ready glass mass is delivered to the forming machines.
This line consists of ten sections. It makes brown glass bottles.
The products undergo another thermal treatment in direct heating furnaces.
The bottles are sprayed with special solution that prevents scratches and scuffs on the bottles during transportation.
The products are ready to undergo quality control.
These machines scan parameters of each bottle to assure they meet all requirements of customers.
Packed products.
There is also another shop where transparent bottles and cans are made and where quality control is performed manually.
The birth of a 2 litres can.
These ones are for vodka.
Quality control.
And ready products.
We also recommend you to see this video:
via dedmaxopka
Why aren’t there any comments on this page? These photos are awesome!
Seriously, being able to see the metamorphis of glass is just cool, especially when it’s interesting to see how the machines were designed to do their job.
excellent examples of automated process, not to mention a good place for the unlucky to lose a limb!
Wow, that’s a LOT of glass production for just one factory.
Really nice series of photos. So the seam on beer bottles is from the mold opening. I had previously thought that bottles are made from two halves.