MILAN HAJEK
Czech inventor
Milan Hajek has a way with waste. Back in 1997 he devised a means to use microwaves to melt glass around industrial waste laden with toxic heavy metals. The melted glass encapsulated the waste, thus making it safe for disposal.
Though his scheme was eventually shelved as too costly, it got Hajek — who today is head of the Center of Microwave Technology in Prague — thinking about using microwaves to melt glass for his country's renowned band of crystal producers. The system he devised, and which he refers to as the Microwave Art Glass Furnace, can now save glassmakers up to 50% in energy costs and spares the environment the nasty emissions produced by gas-fired furnaces.
"Glass is like ice," Hajek says. "If you put an ice cube in the microwave, it won't melt. The microwaves go right through it. But if there's as much as a drop of water on the ice, the drop will heat up and melt the whole cube." After two years of painstaking research and experimentation, Hajek identified a metallic compound — he won't say what it is — that functions like the drop of water on the ice cube. Hajek's compound kick-starts the melting process and can then be removed without a trace. "You need to know something about microwaves, something about glass and combine the two," Hajek says. "The solution was so simple that it made me wonder why no one had come up with it before me."
Hajek has already produced a small furnace for up to 10 kg of glass. Four of the furnaces are currently in operation: two in the Czech Republic, one in France and one in the United States. Hajek says a 30-50-kg model will be available for sale in September. With patents granted or pending in some 60 countries, thousands of years after man first learned how to combine soda from ashes, lime from seashells and silica from beach sand to form glass, Hajek is ready to set the world of crystal manufacture on fire with his microwave furnace.
—JAN STOJASPAL