The Shvabe holding company, a member of the Rostec State Corporation, over the recent years developed and launched commercial production of 21 grades of colourless and coloured optical glass. Investments to the project exceeded 193 million rubles.
Shvabe's members, Research and Technological Institute of Optical Materials All-Russia Scientific Centre "S.I. Vavilov" and Lytkarino Optical Glass Factory (LZOS) have performed a large-scale work for import substitution. Over the recent years, the holding company's organisations have developed and launched commercial production of 10 types of colourless and 11 grades of coloured optical glass.
"Our enterprises have done a colossal work in the glass melting field. In fact, the manufacturing technology has been developed from scratch for each glass grade. Successful implementation of the project allowed us to become entirely independent from imported optical materials", noted the First Deputy General Director of Shvabe Sergey Popov.
As part of the project, new production facilities equipped with advanced technology equipment were built at LZOS. The holding company's enterprise has purchased furnaces for rough annealing of optical colourless glass with a maximum heating temperature of 700 °С, electrical batch furnaces with a glass mixer for melting of fluid optical coloured glass in crucibles, and furnaces for fine annealing of optical colourless glass blanks with a maximum heating temperature of 750 °С.
