Glass

Laminated Safety Glass
Laminated safety glass is made up of two or more layers of glass, permanently bonded together with an interlayer or resin. If broken, the interlayer is designed to hold the glass together. Virtually all glass types can be laminated and the thickness and type of interlayer can be varied to provide safety ballistic, bomb or physical attack resistance. Normal laminated glass can be cut and further processed.

Toughened Laminated Glass
Toughened Laminated Glass is the optimum in safety glass. Two pieces of glass are cut to size, toughened to provide superior structural strength, then bonded together using either PVB or resin as the interlayer medium. This will ensure, if the glass is broken, pieces will be held together by the interlayer.Toughened laminated glass size cannot be adjusted after the productions process.

Toughened Laminated Glass

There are two kinds of toughened glass. Fully toughened and Heat strengthened:

Fully toughened glass is four to five times stronger than ordinary glass and if broken forms small granules.

Heat strengthened glass has a lower residual stress and is two times stronger than ordinary glass. It is not a safety glass and if broken it forms large pieces. To create toughened glass, Float glass is placed in a roller, which rolls through a toughening furnace. The glass is heated then rapidly cooled, resulting in the glass retaining high compressive stresses. Toughened and heat strengthened glass cannot be cut and both are resistant to high temperatures but at different degrees (180–250°C).

Toughened glass can be produced at a number of thickness.

Float Glass

Sand, soda-ash, limestone and dolomite is melted in a furnace to create Float Glass. The furnace outputs a continuous ribbon up to 3660mm wide of molten glass and is floated onto a large bed of molten tin. This mixture slowly solidifies to a thickness controlled by the speed it is drawn over the molten tin. It's then control cooled to anneal the glass - ensuring for flatness and optical clarity and enabling it to be cut - maximising its potential mechanical resistance.

Float Glass is available in clear glass, toned glass, high performance toned glass, ultra clear low iron glass and Low E pyrolytic coated glass.

All glass can be produced at a number of thickness.

Double Glazed Units

Double glazed units are built-up assemblies where two pieces of glass are separated by a spacer. The spaces between pieces of glass can be filled with air or an inert gas, such as Argon. Argon is most common, but Xenon and Krypton are more efficient (and considerably more expensive). The sheets of glass are tempered or laminated for safety and are generally 6mm thick with a 12mm air space.

Finally, the most critical component of the double glassed unit is the desiccant (granules), inside the spacer, which removes humidity from the cavity to prevent condensation within the unit.