Numerical optimisation of blowing glass parison shapes

Industrial glass blowing is an essential stage of manufacturing glass containers, i.e. bottles or jars. An initial glass preform is brought into a mould and subsequently blown into the mould shape. Over the last few decades, a wide range of numerical models for forward glass blow process simulation have been developed. A considerable challenge is the inverse problem: to determine an optimal preform from the desired container shape. A simulation model for blowing glass containers based on finite element methods has previously been developed [6, 7]. This model uses level set methods to track the glass-air interfaces. In previous work of the authors [8] a numerical method was introduced for optimising the