A New Way to Improve Thermal Capacities of Lubricants for the Manufacture of Flint Glass Perfume Bottles: Part A—How to Combine Thermal Analysis and Physico-Chemical Observations at the Glass/Punch Interface

In the hollow glass industry, the success of the forming process depends on controlling the thermal exchange at the glass/mold interface to prevent defects on the glass surface. In the manufacturing process for luxury perfume bottles, the current practice is to deposit a resin film on the inner faces of the mold at the beginning of the production process and regularly swab the mold with a lubricating paste. This study presents a new way to analyze the impact of lubrica- tion on glass/tool thermal exchanges. The TEMPO Laboratory (Valenciennes, France) has an experimental Glass/Tool Interaction (GTI) platform, which is a reduced-scale production unit that allows researchers to reproduce the pressing cycle conditions encountered in the glass industry. To complete the analysis of the thermal exchange at the glass/tool interface, the BCR Center (Mons, Belgium) took physico-chemical measurements on the produced glass samples after the trials on the GTI platform. Part A presents the experimental conditions on the GTI platform and the thermal analy- sis with this platform for the first case of flint glass pressing cycles with a punch swabbed with a lubricating paste de- veloped by our partner, SOGELUB® Special Lubricants Company (Marquain, Belgium). The analysis of the phys- ico-chemical changes on the pressed glass samples produced with the swabbed punch were completed with our obser- vations using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS).