About two years ago XPAR Vision from The Netherlands and Bottero from Italy have started a strategic partnership with the aim to control and optimize the forming process by automation, using their respective systems as a basis. After thorough studies and preparations the first automated closed loop has gone under glass about a year ago followed by a number of closed loops with different functionalities until today. The results so far are exciting. They confirm what was expected beforehand: with these automated closed loop systems it is proven that forming process variation and thus forming process performance can be dramatically improved. A leap in improvement is within reach with regard to pack to melt, weight / volume ratio, speed of production, customer complaints and resorting.
The partnership between XPAR Vision and Bottero, as well as the different automated closed loops, will be marketed under the name BoX. The BoX is Black, representing complex software which is very easy to use. Because the potential use of the BoX is so huge, it is already designed for the future and completely modular. Each module can optimize and automate a specific sub-process of the glass forming process. With the modular approach a customer can make a choice for only those modules which have relevance for his specific glass forming process.
During Glasstec 2012 in Düsseldorf the first modules of the BoX were introduced and are commercially available. It is foreseen that many more modules will appear on the market hereafter.
