Abstract
The innovative in-flight glass melting technology with thermal plasmas was developed for the purpose of energy conservation and environmental protection for glass production. Modeling and experiments of induction thermal plasmas have been performed to investigate the melting behavior of granulated powders injected into thermal plasmas. The thermofluid fields were obtained by solving two-dimensional modeling for argon plasmas under atmospheric pressure. Results show the strong influence of carrier gas flow rate on the melting behavior. With flow rate increasing, the particle size and temperature of glass transition and softening decrease, whereas the amount of unreacted SiO2 increases because of lower plasma temperature and shorter residence time. The experimental results are consistent with the model, which gives valuable practical guidelines in optimizing the process parameters and controlling the product characteristics.
