PPG Awarded Partnership by DOE to Cut Fiber Glass Wastage

PPG Industries Inc. PPG has been awarded a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (“LLNL”) on a project for improving fiber glass production, by the U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”). This award is part of the DOE’s new High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program.

PPG Industries and LLNL will work together on the project to reduce the amount of broken fiber glass during production using LLNL’s high-performance computers. The project attempts to reduce wastage, energy consumption and costs associated with fiber glass manufacturing, while increasing production.

Manufacturing of fiber glass is a high-speed process, wherein the breakage of even one of several thousand glass fibers during the bushing process will cause the entire bundle of fibers under production to break. This results in higher wastage and energy consumption until the manufacturing process can be started again.

To reduce this wastage, PPG Industries and LLNL will perform multiple computer model simulations to gauge the impact of various thermal and physical environments on the fiber glass manufacturing process over a 4,000−tip bushing. LLNL’s powerful computing resources are crucial for the highly complicated and large volume of simulations required for the operation.

PPG Industries’ senior Research Associate, Fiber Glass, John Meng, stated the need for testing thousands of glass fibers in the simulations in order to accurately represent the production process. In the past, several tests accounting for multiple parameters have been carried out over a single fiber but not over thousands. PPG Industries and LLNL aim to work together to develop sophisticated models containing multiple parameters to analyze the interaction between fibers during production, and devise a solution to prevent breakage.

It is expected that this project will help continuous-strand fiber glass manufacturers in the U.S. save 1.7 TBtu annually, by minimizing breakage. PPG Industries will provide $90,000 in technical expertise and help for the project while the DOE will provide LLNL with a $300,000 fund for its effort.

PPG Industries reported adjusted earnings of $1.31 per share for first-quarter 2016, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.30 by a penny. However, sales of $3.7 billion missed the mark. The glass segment of the company reported 2% lower sales from the prior-year quarter at $261 million. The demand for fiber glass improved in Europe but was lower in the domestic market. Income for the segment was $28 million, including a facility repair charge of $8 million. The company is taking steps toward its goal of developing and commercializing customer-driven technologies and consumer branding strategies.

Shares of PPG Industries rose around 0.2% in the trading session on Thursday and closed the day at $108.20.

PPG Industries currently holds a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Some other favorably ranked companies in the chemical space include Axiall Corporation AXLL, Asahi Kasei Corporation AHKSY and Albemarle Corporation ALB, all sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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