Eric Thompson

Picture this, mounds of white powdery looking stuff everywhere. Except its not snow. Its glass. Oh the horror! Its everywhere! What shall we do?!

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That thin glass that you break inside a glow stick is called onion skin. This small diameter, extremely thin walled glass is known for its use in glow sticks due to the fact it is extremely easy to crack. The machine that cuts these tubes to size is known as Sparky, due to its tendency to shoot tiny glass particles everywhere. This creates not only  a dangerous but also messy environment.  I helped design a vacuum collection system that would collect particles where the largest glass piles formed, separate them using the particle separator and pass the gather particles to the ceiling vacuum system, and the heavier ones onto the cullet conveyor.