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Füller extends R&D capacities in 3 locations: speciality glass melting and pressing as well as complex non-isothermal forming at FüllerLAB@TAZSpiegelau; |
Speciality glass melting and micro-particles, complex casting, pressing and blowing at FüllerLAB@FactoryRiedlhütte;
Strengthening and Functional Surfaces at FüllerLAB@KeylabGlassBayreuth
Implementation of a highly complex production line for dispersion mixing, pumping and feeding system into 8-station rotary forming table; complex in numbers: 65 servos and motors for stirrer, pumps and the forming roundtable, 15 heating circuits and 600 electronic in- and output …
Government grant for innovative strengthening technology for glasses “IOX-Booster” in February and inauguration of “Impact Hub” for Pilote Plant in October.
IOX-Booster
New management structure inside Füller Glastechnologie:
Bernhard Altendorfer has been leading the design department and innovation projects for more than 10 years and will continue to do so also in his new role as part of the Management; Alexandra Scheifele-Fuchs has been watching over the business affairs more than 5 years and will continue to do so in her new role as Authorized Officer Finance.
Full servo-based narrow-neck forming system for a fully digital process control. Füller devotes a substantial part of development resources to a very hot topic:
light, strong and stustabinable bottles
Bachelor Program in Glass Pressing,
Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Continued development of servo-based high performance pressing technologies for highly specialized glass forming as well as fully digitalized heating and cooling requirements. The “layers” of the rotary table include the moving frame structures, functional station equipment underneath and above the rotary table, on the outer (static) pitch diameter, above the moulds and in the pressing cross beam. The electronic control in roundtable systems reaches new densities: with 30 servos and just as many temperature control loops.
The Mini-Melter, based on tin-oxide electrodes and complete with Füller-Feeder, receives more colour production features including colour channel, conti-drain and dry cullet/nugget option and includes batch and cullet charging system and batch and cullet preparation and mixing station.
Extend development infrastucture to incorporate melting and flakes into an integrated development platform and all necessary parameter evaluation – and control. As well as reaching out to meshing and milling capabilities.
Intensified: further development of non-isothermal forming focusing on 3-dimensional precision components, including combined heating systems, mould development and handling strategies.
Fully automatic heavy blowing system: a totally new system which extends the range of what machines are capable of achieving in glass forming.
Ceramic Crucible:
The micro-melter receives a non-platinum twin: for glass compositions that are not compatible with precious metals – and still can enjoy the melting, feeding and forming infrastructure of micro-melter solutions; the reference is.
Servo-based forming of dispersion-based glass fibres to provide high-performance insulation materials. Glass in liquid – but cold – application. New challenges – new solutions: from single-station pilote system to rotary table system with revolving moulds and satellite functional stations.
Incorporating the bead forming technology into micro-melter development platform while extending the range of bead sizes from micro- to milli-beads; and from there: scaling to continuous feeding and production for 1,5 t melter bead production.
Single station press co-operates with a variety of feeding methods and combined with micro-melter, Füller feeder, robot and manual casting …
… and goes from 2 gr to extra heavy glass componets of 40 and more kg of glass or crystal
2020
New developments and applications of fully integrated and fully automated production lines for non-isothermal pressing of precision components.
The MMC is designed to control motion and temperature loops and additionally the MMC becomes the master mind also of robots: with the integration of industrial robots into the global machine control plenty of additional features open up.
Scaling the liquid-in-liquid colour technology to 350 to 450 kg frit melding in 24 hours; this gives a colour production of 3 t to 45 t (or double) at 1 to 10 % dilution rate.
Focus on feeding and production technologies for speciality decanters, flasks, flacons, ultra thin bottles, etc. – strong focus on optimum conditions for feeding parisons and blanks for different applications.
The single-station servo-pressing technology receives a new feature: with invert and blowing station a small-scale flacon-specialist expands the portfolio for high quality flacons for small series featuring direct gob feeding and electric mould heating.
Looking back at more than 15 years of a very fruitful co-operation and looking forward to many more to come: in 2017 Alexandra Füller joins Hochschulrat of the University of Bayreuth.
And in 2019 a special focus is devoted to glass related research and development: The Keylab Glastechnologie and Füller will join efforts in more and more projects.
Single station performance in 20 t servo-pressing for Fresnel solar pressing technology; 2 and more servos for pressing with plunger and ring from above and below.
Technology solutions for highest quality containers – the single station pre-forming system receives more and more technology features for top performances…
10 to 50 kg lab scale melting and high-precison and single-station forming system for glass formula and process innovation.
New roller system with combined water-cooling for dry frit intended use of milling for highly specialized applications as well as dry frit for contamination-free cullets for re-melting.
Special focus on the modular blowing technology and integration of all processes for seamless wine glasses and thick-ice tumblers, high vases and wide wine and narrow neck decanters, providing a high degree of production flexibility.
The Mini-Melter is used for in-house development of colour glass (copper ruby containers) and new blowing forming applications for decanters and containers.
EFFEkT, Energie- and Process Chain for Manufacturing Technologies for Complex Optical Components made of Glass focusing on Energy and other Resources Saving
First fully automated production line for speciality glass joining micro-melter and roundtable pressing system with revolving pressing units.
The micro-melter is providing a very versatile technology solution in Füller’s portfolio with many projects to come – also in combination with a highly specialized single-station pressing system.
Michael Konz joins Reinhold Seiz and will take on the lead on electronic control MMC from 2022. The MMC will be transferred to windows 10 and TwinCAT 3 and will take on the challenge of cyber security, big data management in ever more complex production systems.
The roundtable pressing technology continues to provide a platform for very bespoke technology solutions for individual production environments and becomes a comprehensive production line solutions integrating directly heated platinum feeder systems and hot-end processing and handling to meet highly individualized productions conditions and highly specialized glass applications.
Fully integrated stemware line for seamless wine glass including 6/18 press/blow and blow/blow technology feature combination, conditioning technology, pulled and decorated stem, stem-stretching and welding functions, integrated handling and high quality feeder for blowing and stem/foot pressing production.
Introducing narrow neck blowing into the portfolio has opened up a new field of activity with many ways to explore high-quality applications and degrees of automation for decanters, flacons, flasks, bottles and all sorts of containers: from production support for manual glass forming to multi-gob container glass forming.
Establish a solid co-operation for furnace design work in mini-melter applications with 
mini-melter and mini-furnace applications receive a platform for a fully integrated solution.
Establishment of an integrated process chain for the cost-efficient manufacturing of complex glass optics
CENTiMO
Liquid-in-Liquid Colour Glass System for award winning Originality bottle; with its compact format the colour pre-melting and feeding system allows integration into existing forehearth and feeder systems with a range of applications to follow not only for blowing but also for pressed glass shapes
The Füller non-isothermal glass forming joins the Fraunhofer IPT in Aachen and provides a platform for precision pressing developments for industrial partners or for research consortium configurations – like CENTiMO, InnoForm and EFFEkT; the integration of different pre-heating systems for glass planks of different shapes and thicknesses is a very solid platform for precision pressing innovation; the system will grow in the Füller in-house installation and will be extended by other heating methods and combinations thereof
mini-melter providing billets for manual blowing
and injection moulding
continued mini-melting development for highly specialized fibre glass manufacturing: providing technology solutions for high temperature applications both for melting and precision feeding and including new technology features like submerged heating elements, electronically controlled bubbling and highly specialized glass contact materials.
Feeder and single station systems target max. dimensions with stream-moulding and injectipn pressing reaching 20 to 50 kg articles
2010
Production of Glass Beads with a high Sphericity from Glass Melt to Forming
Melting, Feeding Forming of Glas-Spheres
New roundtable press generation opening many highly specialized applications to come: the roundtable pressing technology is designed to provide platform of innovation for highly customized production systems with extended design and adaptation engineering priot to build and implementation: the roundtable press becomes a highly “bespoke” technology package.
The mini-melter development receives a special focus on colour glass melting to provide an alternative technology solution for traditional pot furnace or day tank production environments: its two most important features are tin-oxide electrodes as well as the interface to using the Füller-Feeding system for high-quality glass feeding of precisely reproducible glass weights, while maintaining on/off capability of both feeder and melter.
New generation blowing system – combining press/blow and blow/blow features as well as rotation and static blowing; providing the platform to scale to 1/1, 1/3, 1/6, 2/12, 6/12, 6/18, 2/20 blowing technology solutions and fully automated, digitalized and integrated production lines.
Modular Mini-Melter
Prototyp of a modular “Mini-Melting-System”,
manufacturing technology for high-quality glasses
Channel colour development using liquid-in-liquid colour technology with a great variety of applications yet to come including the iconic Originality Absolut.
The lens production process is extended into the field of hot-forming of blanks for the non-isothermal forming process; the precision gobs are to become an important starting point for precision forming.
Mini-Melter and forming technology at the University of Bayreuth: beginning of a continuous and very creative R&D co-operation exploring a great variety of fields of interest – centering around glass, glass contact materials, heating technologies, glass in composite materials and the provision of glass in micro-particles – beads, flakes, frits, fibres….
Alexandra Füller, M.A., joins the family business and founds Füller Glastechnologie Vertrieb-GmbH together with Marianne Füller; the new company is to provide a platform for co-operation, developments and implementations of hot-end production technology.
First non-isothermal production line for car-light lenses based on servo-pressing system and infrared heating: to be followed by more than 20 fully automated lines.
Millennium with Waterford Crystal Ball Drop on Times Square…
2000
Roundtable combi-system for pressing, spinning, injecting and casting; all-servo pressing and motions including machine frame movement for direct feeding; the production flexibility has made its way into a great variety of modular combi-systems yet to come – including integration of blowing functions ….
Waterford Crystal and Füller intensify innovation in glass forming: electrically heated feeder system, direct feeding both for single station injection pressing as well as high-quality blowing, full servo-technology including servo-pressing.
Füller technology solutions receive a priceless partner: the MMC – a truly magic machine control - will be partnering with our machine design team and will be enabling really everything. Ing. Reinhold Seiz starts to develop, build and implement a DOS-based version of the MMC enabling to use a graph-based motion control. In 2006 the MMC will shift to Windows and many function will grow into the system – such as HMI interfaces, spline graphic for motion control, data mining triggers and many more.
“Füller-Feeder” Technology and Shear System featuring refractory T-shape and electric heating, stirring plunger and heated orifice
1990
Founding of Ingenieurbüro Dipl.Ing (FH) Hermann Füller; Hermann Füller has started his career with Nachtmann and company “Füller” started with developing feeding and forming solutions for high-quality glass manufacturing.
